Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection
Jake Luck Interview
Interview number: 53.33
[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is the River Runners Oral History Project, and we're sitting here in Kanab, Utah, talking to Jake Luck. It's May 2, 1994.
Steiger: For starters, you were born in Vernal?
Luck: That's right.
Steiger: About when?
Luck: April 28, 1934.
Steiger: Right in the middle of the Depression!
Luck: Yeah. We were hungry back then -damned hungry. You worked three or four days to get a half-a-day's pay -my dad did. I remember it. I remember the CCCs [Civilian Conservation Corps], I remember the WPA [Works Progress Administration], and the whole bit. My dad did a lot of work on the Dinosaur National Monument. In fact, most of the rock and the powder work up there, he did.
Steiger: And that was CCC?
Luck: WPA. CCCs built roads in the more out-back country.
Steiger: And your aunt married Parley Galloway, who was Nathaniel Galloway's kid?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And Galloway did a couple of trips in 1909 or something like that?
Luck: In all probability, according to his record, he was through there before Powell was -being a prospector and a trapper, through the Grand Canyon. Wally Perry has his documents.
Steiger: You mean he was through there in the 1860s?
Luck: Quite probably. See, Wally Perry is. . . . This woman that Parley was married to, Parley Galloway and Loretta, are Wally's grandparents.
Steiger: Parley Galloway is Wally Perry's grandfather?
Luck: Wally Perry's granddad. It's true.
Steiger: I'll be damned! I didn't know that either! Well, what kind of guy was he? Did you ever meet him?
Luck: Parley Galloway died the year I was born. I never got to talk to the man. But he was a hard-drinking outdoorsman. In fact, that's what killed him -he died over here by Cedar City in the wintertime, drunk. He froze to death, as I recall.
Steiger: But his dad, Nathaniel, went down there maybe before Powell, on account of, he was trapping and stuff?
Luck: Yeah. Then he started guiding hunting trips through there.
Steiger: Through the Grand, the whole damned thing?
Luck: Yeah. Old Nate Galloway was one tough sonofabitch. My dad and he knew one another quite well. My dad said he was the best rifle shot, and had the best eye for stock, of anybody he'd ever seen, and my dad was no slouch. But _____ be out there 300-400 yards and old Nate Galloway would say, "That looks like a nice fat wether," and let that sheep down [ed: shoot it] and go over there and it'd be a nice fat wether. Just standing there.
Steiger: Now what the hell is a wether?
Luck: It's a male sheep that's been neutered.
Steiger: You mean like it's a farm animal or something?
Luck: Yeah, been castrated. (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: And his name is Joe. . . .
Luck: Collander [phonetic spelling]. Hell of a guy. You know what three-eighths of an inch looks like?
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: Okay, they needed a light-filtering device for some of this aerospace shit. He drilled 670-some odd holes in this three-eights of an inch square piece of material.
Steiger: Wow, that's. . . . Man oh man!
Luck: Yeah!
Steiger: Well, did he used to run a boat?
Luck: Yeah, for GCE [Grand Canyon Expeditions].
Steiger: That's where I've seen him.
Luck: Yeah, he's a pretty fair boat driver. Not on the magnitude that you or I or. . . .
Steiger: (laughs) Right!
Luck: One night Ron Smith and I were setting and drinking, [talking over] this oars-versus-motors bit. He said, "What a lot of people don't know, guys like you and me had to pump a hell of a lot of goddamn oak and ash before anybody would trust us with a motor." (laughs)
Steiger: Well, that is. . . . You don't know until you try to do it. I mean, what most people don't understand -especially the little rowing guys -is just that the bigger the boat, the harder it is to get it through there. And when the water is low. . . .
Luck: Well, the more weight you're dealing with, the more inertia you're dealing with.
Steiger: All that. I wanted to get back to Nathaniel Galloway. So your dad knew him?
Luck: Oh yeah.
Steiger: And then he knew Parley too, and all that.
Luck: There was an old historian up in Vernal -he was also a photographer -Leo Thorne [phonetic spelling]. He said Nate Galloway was the toughest sonofabitch he knew and had ever met. I said, "Why's that, Leo?" And this guy had quite a museum with different artifacts. He said, "Well. . . ." -everybody up in that country called him Nate -he said, "Old Nate was out prospecting on the Ute Reservation, had a little bit of a diggings there. He was sleeping down in this hole in the ground he'd dug out. These Utes came up and told him to get the hell out of there or they'd kill him." He got out of there and stayed gone a few months, I guess, according to Thorne, and he came back. And he woke up during the night and these three Utes are standing above him with knives. They told him, "We told you we'd kill you." And Nate Galloway was not a big man. He came up out of that hole and killed all three of those Utes with their own knives. That's the kind of man he was.
Steiger: Holy moley!
Luck: Pretty tough guy. And he was well respected.
Steiger: Well I wonder how come, if he did go before Powell, when Powell came down and got all this publicity, I wonder how come he didn't say, "Fuck you, I was there long ago!" He didn't care or something?
Luck: Oh, he wasn't into that kind of stuff. A lot of people aren't into publicity -including this one.
Steiger: Are you okay? Joe was talking about you hurting and stuff. You got bad stuff going on in your guts or something?
Luck: My head. Eighteen months ago, I had four teeth taken out by a dentist. There was an infection flared up, got dry socket, and he insisted it was going to be alright, fitted me with dentures. It got worse and worse and worse. He went in and dug on me. Tried to deaden it with Lidocaine, and I've never suffered such pain in my life, because it wasn't deadening. And I ended up going to a specialist. And he went in and dug out this mess. It took him an hour and fifteen minutes. In fact, old Joe drove me over, because they said I had to have somebody to drive me back. He knocked me plumb out and dug this out. Through all this happening, I suffered some nerve damage and those nerves are all inflamed.
Steiger: I might have some stuff called Anaprox in my little first aid kit.
Luck: He's got me loaded up on such heavy shit I don't dare mess with anything: Cortisone to super-high-powered antibiotics. He figured it would take two weeks for it to go away.
Steiger: I had a bad time with my wisdom teeth. Well, what did your dad do?
Luck: (chuckles) A lot of things.
Steiger: If you don't mind my asking. I just wondered.
Luck: He was a powder monkey, until he got to where he couldn't handle it any more because of the severe headaches. He helped build roads all over that country up there, in the mountains and stuff. When they were drilling for natural gas over in the Clay Basin, the man cut firewood with an axe to fire the boilers. Then back in World War II, I went with him up in the mountains and we cut mine props for the coal mines in Carbon County. An old man by the name of Leslie Murphy would get the contracts for these coal mines in Carbon County, and we cut the mine props in northern Uintah County. He started cutting those props with a hand-powered saw. He'd fell a tree with an axe, and then buck 'em up into lengths with a hand-powered saw.
Steiger: Meaning just a big old bow saw, or one of those like a two-man thing?
Luck: It was like a two-man thing, only it was short enough that one man could operate it. And I was six or seven years old. He'd have me carry -one of these props I was able to pick up and shoulder out to where they could get to them with a truck. I'd carry those sonsofbitches on my shoulders until they'd bleed. And that old man would just keep on sawing. Then he devised a power outfit along about World War II that he and I could operate. Me and that old man were cutting a thousand linear feet or better of props a day. That's a lot of damned mine props. But he figured out rollways to where a kid could handle it. Started me driving an old 1929 Chevrolet that he had rigged up as a more-or-less logging truck, when I was nine years old.
Steiger: Just get them around?
Luck: No, haul them down off the damned mountain. I don't know if you've ever been off the face of the Uintahs, but it's quite a jump. Then when I was thirteen, he had me haul them alone. When I was ten, he and I and one old cowboy that got a Forest Service motor grader operator drunk-up at lunch -that afternoon we built about seven miles of new road down off the face of that mountain.
Steiger: In one afternoon?
Luck: One afternoon. That old cowboy got up in the cab of that motor grader with the operator, showing him where he figured a good road would go. They bladed it out, and dad and I walked along behind and threw rocks off. Six or seven miles down, six or seven miles back up the face of that mountain. A long afternoon. And that road still exists! That was fifty years ago this summer.
Steiger: Damn that must have been something to have all that open country and not many people in it.
Luck: Oh yeah! The old man and I'd back up in that woods. Sometimes it'd be, oh, pushing thirty days before we'd ever see another living soul. Camped out up there, cutting timber. It was good back then. Then when I got to be about fifteen, sixteen, another one of my favorite memories was going poaching deer in an airplane. (laughter)
Steiger: In an airplane?! Who was driving that?
Luck: My instructor. He had me working around the airport there to help him out, help pay for my flying lessons. He'd say, "It's getting hungry over at my house. Be here at five o'clock in the morning." This one big grassy meadow had a long straight stretch of road in it, and there were always deer in it in the morning. We'd spot them, and he'd just glide that thing down, set it down, totally quiet. We'd knock one down, drag him over, throw him in the airplane and we were gone! Scott Dunn [phonetic spelling] got a big kick out of that. A few years ago I took him up there and showed him where all this took place.
Steiger: And how old were you then?
Luck: About fifteen.
Steiger: And you'd already decided you were going to be a pilot?
Luck: Yeah, I soloed on my sixteenth birthday.
Steiger: What kind of airplane was it?
Luck: The one we were hauling the deer out in, or the one I learned to fly?
Luck: Well, both of them.
Luck: The one we were hauling the deer out in was an old Stinson Stationwagon, 150-horse Franklin in it.
Steiger: Is that like a big old radial?
Luck: No, a six-cylinder post [engine]. The one I learned to fly in was basically a Taylor Craft, a whole 65 horses in it. You had to pay attention to get out of the Uintah Basin with 65 horses.
Steiger: Well, that's right there in the late forties?
Luck: Late forties.
Steiger: Right there about the end of World War II?
Luck: Yeah, just after the end of World War II. And the old boy also was teaching me how to mechanic.
Steiger: Your dad? or this guy that was teaching you to fly?
Luck: The old boy at the airport. By then Dad and I were out of the timber and he'd gone to work down there with Bus Hatch as a carpenter.
Steiger: And did he like that? I guess Bus Hatch was quite the. . . .
Luck: Oh, he was a character. He and Dad got along good. Bus was a damned-good carpenter.
Steiger: I read that book of Roy Webb's. Did you ever see that?
Luck: I got a copy of it.
Steiger: How'd you like that?
Luck: It was pretty true to form about Bus, yeah.
Steiger: I really liked that whole part about how they cottoned-onto Parley Galloway ______________ in jail, and how he actually talked his way out by saying he was going to take them down in the Grand Canyon, and then he took off.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: So he was kind of a rounder?
Luck: Oh, I guess. I've never heard any of my family talk bad about the man, though.
Steiger: Well, I guess the Hatches and them guys were pissed at him then. Or were they?
Luck: I don't really think Bus carried any animosity over that -not to my knowledge anyway.
Steiger: It's funny, I guess. You think about Nathaniel and it sounds kind of like he really figured out a lot of stuff about how to run a boat, that he was way ahead of any of them other guys that went down there: like Powell, or Stanton, or anybody else for that matter.
Luck: We'll put it this way: When Nate Galloway was out on these rivers and stuff like there, there wasn't a whole crew of people to pull his ass out of the fire. He had to do it all by himself, had to depend on himself entirely. You remember Dock Marston?
Steiger: I know who he was.
Luck: Marston in one of his books made the statement that Galloway was probably the most astute outdoorsman he had ever encountered.
Steiger: Wow, that's a lot coming from Marston.
Luck: Otis was not kind to most people.
Steiger: To anybody, hardly. Did you know him?
Luck: Oh yeah. He couldn't say too much good about anybody, but when he came out with that, I said, "Whew! this came out of Marston?!" But it had to be true because of all the things that Dad has told me about the guy. And guys like that old photographer up there.
Steiger: And your dad said he was the straightest shot?
Luck: Best rifle shot he'd ever seen.
Steiger: I've seen my dad set there smoking his pipe, watching young guys blaze away at a deer going up across a wash. They started at maybe 300 yards, "bangedy-bang-bang, bangedy-bang-bang." Once in a while they could get the deer onto a trot, and when they decided he was out of range, the old man would lay down his pipe, pick up his old rifle and let him down. (laughter)
Steiger: So if he said somebody was a good shot. . . .
Luck: They were goddam sure a good shot! I've seen my dad take a 25-35 at a hundred yards, standing off-hand, put round, after round, after round, into the end of a beer can.
Steiger: At a hundred yards?
Luck: Uh-huh. Standing off-hand, no rest, no nothing.
Steiger: And no scope?
Luck: No scope, open sights.
Steiger: Sounds like your dad had pretty good eyes.
Luck: Yeah, that he did, up until the last. It's a hereditary thing, Lew. Well, right now, with these glasses, I've got 20/15. It's what the doc figures I was running before I got burned too many times down here.
Steiger: Damn, I got 20/200. (laughter) I can just kind of see a rosy glow.
Luck: It's like the State of Utah went to renew my driver's license, and they said, "Are you wearing glasses?" this and that. "Yeah." They wanted to know why. I said, "Hey, when you've had vision all your life of 20/15 and all of a sudden it drops to 20/20, it scares the hell out of you! (laughter) But I'm bragging on me, so what the hell. All of my family has had real good vision.
Steiger: Well, when you were learning to fly that plane, what were you thinking of doing with that -aside from poaching deer? What made you want to do that?
Luck: I went down and took my first airplane ride. This old man broke a law big-time: there were three of us young bucks. He got us off the ground, he was flying along there straight and level, and I said, "Is that all there is to it?" He said, "What do you mean, 'is that all there is to it?'?" I said, "Can't this thing do some tricks?" (chuckles) He said, "You little smart bastard -hang on." (laughter) He made the other two sicker than hell, but I liked that feeling, and G forces, no Gs, just total weightlessness, watching the world roll around out there in front of you. The old man took a liking to me, and so he started showing me how to do this stuff. By the time he was done with me, I was way deep into basic aerobatics. Then I had to give it up because of health problems -and money. God that gets expensive!
Steiger: Yeah, if you're not doing it for a living or something. Well how did you end up going to war and all that, getting in the Service?
Luck: I volunteered for the Draft when I got out of high school. By then, you see, I was a licensed pilot, and was an eighteen-year-old kid, and I wanted to fly one of these liaison planes. And they didn't want to hear it, so they ended up putting me in a Special Forces unit, regimental combat team. Everybody in there is supposed to be super-trained. You run an eight-week cycle on basic training/boot camp/whatever, in a sixteen-week. They put me through twenty-one weeks, learning how to kill and stomp and maim, then sent me to Korea. They teach you some neat shit in those last few weeks: stuff that you can definitely use to defend yourself.
Steiger: How old were you then?
Luck: Eighteen, just turned eighteen.
Steiger: I guess it was a world of difference between going over there and then coming back.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: The way you looked at everything and stuff.
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: I don't understand any of that, I just know from people I know that ever went, it seemed like that was a huge, huge thing.
Luck: I went into that outfit, they were on Kogido [phonetic spelling] Island, trying to get their strength back. They took some pretty hard hits. In fact, they'd just rescued the first Marines off of Heartbreak Ridge.
Steiger: I don't know that much about it.
Luck: That was one nasty place. And then we went in and made a water landing, somewhere up along Korea, walked all goddam night long, and most of the next day and ended up on a hillside. See all these people around all over on the other hillside, wondering what in the hell was going on. They told us we had to dig some fox holes. I dug me one -dug that sonofabitch deep, too, boy. (chuckles) Along in the night I went to sleep. I woke up, and there's this light above me. I thought, "Oh shit, what's going on here?" I just laid there real quiet, not breathing. This is the story I started to tell you a while ago. I was staring at this light. "Aw, it ain't moving." By God, it did move. "No, it ain't moving." And your heart starts to pound. You wonder what the hell is there. You don't dare say anything. When you laid down in the bottom of that hole, you were one big brave sonofabitch. Now there's something up there shining that you don't understand, and you're about to shit your pants. I watched that thing and watched that thing. Finally after what seemed like an eternity, I started sneaking up on it. What would be your guess was glowing there?
Steiger: I don't know. You mean you crawled out of your hole and went after it?
Luck: No, it was right on the edge of the hole. It was a goddam phosphorescent root that had terrified me, glowing there in the night. (chuckles)
Steiger: You were down deep in that hole.
Luck: I was laying right in the bottom, asleep. You goddam sure get tired. Let me give you a little insight to these guys making these water landings: You see them run this landing craft up on the beach, they drop that gate, and these guys come running and charging out of there -brave men. Bullshit! What they want to do is get away from that goddam barge. Because you're standing in there, just as tight as they can pack you. You've been in there for hours, and people have to relieve themselves somewhere. You're standing in this urine and excrement and vomit, well above your ankles. These guys ain't wantin' to run out there and kill somebody, they just want to get away from that goddam stinking boat! (laughs) The thought probably never entered your mind, did it?
Steiger: No, not once.
Luck: It doesn't, most people.
Steiger: No, I don't know shit about any of that.
Luck: That was my thought, to get away from this sonofabitch.
Steiger: How long did you end up staying over there?
Luck: Thirteen months. They held me longer. (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: That looks like an old piston ring.
Luck: Way older than that. Remember the old wooden wagon wheels?
Steiger: That was the hub thing?
Luck: They had the wooden hub, and then they had these hoops that held the wooden hub together. You've probably never rode on an iron-tired wagon, have you?
Steiger: You know, I think I have. I went to this camp in Prescott, and there was this old guy named Bud Brown and he had all these mules and horses and all this stuff. I mean, it was kind of hokey, but he had them. He had a buckboard and that had rubber tires, but he had a stagecoach, and that had -I'm pretty sure that did have iron wheels. And he would drive that thing around.
Luck: Let me tell you one of the damnedest sounds you've ever heard in your life, or ever hope to hear. In the wintertime, they used to go down and cut these big blocks of ice out of the Green River or off Calder's Pond which was there in town. Then they'd load it in these iron-tired wagons. And it's anywhere from zero to forty below zero. They're pulling these iron-tired wagons loaded with that ice, running on ice. And those old iron rims put up a screech you cannot believe, rolling over that ice. God, you can hear it for two or three miles!
Steiger: That was out of Green River, Wyoming? or Green River, Utah?
Luck: The Green River there in the Uintah Basin. The river used to freeze over solid before they put in the lake at Flaming Gorge. It's a sound I'll never hear again in my life. You could hear those goddam wagons half-way across the valley.
Steiger: And what were they hauling that ice for?
Luck: They'd store it: put it in the big ice house, insulated with sawdust, so they'd have ice in the summertime. And this Calder's Pond was a big creamery company, Calder's Creamery. They made some of the best ice cream I've ever tasted in my life. Those days are past now. But they had to keep that ice -they sold ice to the public -but they had to have the ice to make any ice cream.
Steiger: So like the whole time you were growing up, you pretty much lived around Vernal there, just in that general area?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: What was it like growing up with Ted and them guys?
Luck: Ted was one wild sonofabitch. I never ran around with him that much -we just went to school together is all.
Steiger: There can't have been a very big. . . . How many kids were in a class? Fifty or something like that?
Luck: Oh no, not that many.
Steiger: How did you end up on the river? Did you get started with Ted and them?
Luck: No. Got drunk. (laughs) No, I started working for Curry probably about 1965-1966, mechanicing for him. Bryce Macky [phonetic spelling] was working for Curry at that time, just after he'd got run over with that truck and hurt.
Steiger: After Bryce had?
Luck: (passing truck -or maybe airplane? -obscures response) And I was wrenching there for a guy that ran a bunch of oil field service trucks. And Bryce come down and between he and I we built an engine and one thing and another for his wife's car and put it in it at the shop I was working at. He got disgruntled with the people that were doing the mechanic work for him, and kind of asked me if I'd moonlight and do it, and so I did. This went on for quite a while, and then I started doing driving for him. I was deathly afraid of water -you see, I don't swim. That's a strike against being a river runner, right?
Steiger: Well, I don't know, it depends.
Luck: That's why I drive a boat so goddam good! (laughter) I might not swim, but I've pulled a lot of people who envisioned themselves as super swimmers, back to the boat. I'm smart enough to wear a life jacket. But anyway, these guys got me all beered up and I made the promise, "Yeah, I'll go on a goddam one-day trip with you." ________________ with a crew was running at that time, on a one-day basis. I kind of liked it. Then that fall, as a way of saying thanks, Curry came and said, "You like to fish, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, I sure as hell do." "How would you like to catch a steelhead?" I said, "What's a steelhead?" He said, "It's a big mean rainbow trout that's been out to the ocean and come back." "That sonofabitch has got to be mean if he's been to the ocean and come back!" So he took me on a complimentary trip up on the main Salmon. I got a few pointers on how to row boats through there. The next spring he sent Bryce down with a note, where I was working -I'd changed places of employment at that time, still hanging on a wrench. The only difference was, it was more equipment and bigger equipment -an earth-moving outfit. I opened up the note and it said, "How'd you like to run a boat through Grand Canyon?" I thought, "Boy, that's my kettle of fish!" I'd seen the Grand Canyon once -I'd been down to Diamond Creek with Bryce to pick up Curry.
Steiger: And you saw it right there?
Luck: We were one of the first commercial trip river pull-outs to go out of Diamond Creek.
Steiger: Well, when you saw it, did you just see Diamond Creek, or did you guys swing by the rim or something?
Luck: We swung by the rim.
Steiger: And so that would have been 1965? That's about when that was?
Luck: In 1967. This was the spring of 1968 when Jack sent that note down. And so I ended up driving one of his vehicles down here, pulling a load of stuff. His wife and I went into Salt Lake and did a bunch of last-minute shopping. We were one of the first ones out of Vernal, ______ warehouse. Picked up some stuff, and I pulled into here in one hellacious snowstorm, into Kanab. Spent the night, and the rest of them caught up with me, the next day, late. We went through deep snow. The only one that got stuck was Jack Curry, going over the Kaibab. We had to go back and get him. I'm not belittling Jack. I ended up on a little boat he called "Baby J." He sewed j-tubes, you know, the snout bit, onto the back end of a regular twenty-two-foot tube. Put a little flat frame on it. Deadheaded to Phantom. My first squint at the river, and I was following a guy that had three trips. No way in hell you're going to do that today, right?
Steiger: So that was the first time, and you're driving a boat. And you've got people? You had paying customers on there?
Luck: No, deadheaded to Phantom.
Steiger: Oh, so you got to practice up, and then you got the paying customers at Phantom? (chuckles)
Luck: Being as I was a rookie, they gave me a little old wore-out 18-horse Johnson [motor]. You had to hold the throttle open for thirty to forty-five seconds before it would pick up on the second cylinder and start firing. Some god-awful rides! We made it. I was following a guy by the name of Lee Sutton. He was running an old Hatch-type rig with the motor hanging over the deflated back tube, ____________ flipper.
Steiger: A tail-dragger, uh-huh. Did it have a floor in it?
Luck: We had put a self-bailing floor in it. Something I'll never forget: We were supposed to pick up people at Phantom Ranch, and so we camped at Hance, just Sutton and I. We'd had a little spirits, and laid down there by the dying fire and about half dozed off. All of a sudden I realized we weren't there long, and I kind of turned over and here are these two big well-muscled hairy legs. "Jesus, what's this?! We're supposed to be way off from anybody." The guy said, "Hi," and we said "hi," and he said, "I'm Colin Fletcher."
Steiger: I'll be damned! So was he doing his walk?
Luck: No, he was doing some more stuff. It was after he'd made his big walk. So we spent the night there together, went on down and loaded up people at Phantom. Everything went fine until we got to Crystal. (laughter) This is the first time I'd seen Crystal.
Steiger: It was The Crystal, then. It was 1967.
Luck: It was The Crystal. It was 1968. And Sutton said, "Whatever you do, you have got to get to the right of that big hole, and then do whatever you can with the other one." (laughter) I got to the right of the big hole with this little old rickety boat, pretty top-heavy with ten people on it.
Steiger: Now the big hole. . . . There was two of them, and the big one was the first one?
Luck: Yeah. And then there was a real sharp dinger kind of to the left down again' the wall. Goddam I missed that top hole. I was pretty proud of myself. I attribute the missing of that top hole to some of my earlier upbringing, riding motorcycles, learning to fly airplanes, racing stock cars and stuff.
Steiger: You raced stock cars?
Luck: I raced fourteen years' worth of dirt track.
Steiger: You were driving?
Luck: Uh-huh, and a little blacktop, but mostly dirt track. Son of a bitch, I hung that goddam boat up on them rocks down there in the Rock Garden. I walked around trying to figure what the hell to do with this. Finally I decided if I got everybody over on this side of the boat, it might. . . .
Steiger: So you just moved them around and it came off?
Luck: Uh-huh. After we got down to the bottom and pulled it over to the bank and I'm standing there, my knees banging together. This one guy came up and said, "Jake, how many trips you got through here?" I said, "Just the same number you got." (laughter) He said, "Jesus Christ, this is my first one!" (laughter)
Steiger: This is a passenger?
Luck: Yeah. Yeah, we didn't have no swamps back then. [Ed: A "swamp" or "swamper" is a helper.]
Steiger: So if you were going to do it, you were going to do it.
Luck: Right. It was just Sutton and me. He had ten people and I had ten people.
Steiger: And that was the trip, that was it?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: Holy moley! And what were those people like?
Luck: They were adventurers, they were not tourists. Back then these people were. . . . You know, when the chaplin went over the goddam hill, it was probably just about right for them. (laughter) They didn't want to be namby-pambied around, no special favors, they jumped in and they would help you. It didn't matter. If you said you needed something, by God, it was there. You know, outdoorspeople -not the guy that's doing it because the Joneses next door did it.
Steiger: Yeah. Did they have much money? Or did that even enter into it very much?
Luck: It wasn't that big a deal. It was something like $175.
Steiger: So how did that trip go after you guys got off the island then?
Luck: Well, I had another severe incident at Bedrock. (chuckles)
Steiger: Went left, or something?
Luck: You might say that. They told me, "There's a big rock in the river down here. It's best if you go to the right side of it." Well up in there by Specter, I saw this big rock. And I eyeballed it and I said, "Bullshit, I don't want to go to the right side of that sonofabitch. Unt-uh! Somebody got their wires crossed." Okay, big rock is passed. Alright. Got on down there a ways, and the river broke over this crest. All of a sudden, "Jesus Christ! That's the rock they're talking about, and I'm on the left side of the river!" Well, I started bending it to the right -that wasn't getting it. I was going to hit that rock, no two ways about it, and I knew if I hit it sideways, it was all over but the crying. So I figured at the last split second I had left I squared it around and I took that bitch head-on. Folded that little piece of rubber up into a "U," slammed people around, it sprung back and went down around the left side. The water was low enough that on the left side you had these ledges to contend with. I was hung on these goddam ledges. We worked our way off them and went ka-thunk down to the bottom, and went on out. Then, by God, I paid more attention to what was going on. When I got back to Vernal, I said, "Bullshit, I don't want to do that ever again." I had more shell-shock than when I came out of Korea.
Steiger: No kidding?!
Luck: No shit!
Steiger: You mean when you said, "Don't want to do that," you meant "ever run the river again"?
Luck: Yeah. This was Easter, so I spent that summer hanging on a wrench on big old greazy goddam diesel-powered units. Spent another winter, then here come Bryce with another little note, "How'd you like to run another boat through Grand Canyon?" Well, I got over the shakes. "Goddam right!" So here we went. You've seen that poster of Curry's? This was in 1969. It said, "You haven't seen the Grand Canyon until you see it from the river."
Steiger: And that's in Crystal. That's the big hole.
Luck: I'm driving that sonofabitch.
Steiger: And that is the big hole, isn't it? That's the top hole?
Luck: Yeah. I was driving J-1. The day after they took that picture, I broke four ribs in Deubendorff.
Steiger: And that was your second trip?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: Did you hit the holes [intentionally] for pictures?
Luck: Nope, I was following a guy by the name of Roger Upwall [phonetic spelling]. He said, "Whatever you do, just stay in my tracks."
Steiger: And that's where he went?
Luck: That's where he went, and that's where I went. I knew how to miss that hole.
Steiger: Well, that was a whole 'nother boat, though. That was a different story.
Luck: Oh yeah, it was a more stable boat than what I had. If I'd have hit that hole that way, I would have flipped that little one.
Steiger: Did you know anything about the geology or history or anything?
Luck: Not at that time.
Steiger: It was just "get 'em on through"? Did you have a map then?
Luck: Yeah, we had Jones' map, a little scroll map.
Steiger: What was the routine like? What kind of kitchen was there, and the toilet, and just all that? What was the daily deal like?
Luck: Well, the toilet was, go out, dig a hole, you bury it. The kitchen was much the same as it is today. Jack Curry ran a very, very good kitchen, because he was a professional cook before he went into river running.
Steiger: He was?!
Luck: He was a professional pancake flipper for Pillsbury.
Steiger: For Pillsbury?!
Luck: You ought to watch that sonofabitch with a spatula. I picked-up on a lot of things. My crew, when I was feeding pancakes, I never fed them in front of me. I fed them behind me.
Steiger: And that's what a professional would do, huh?
Luck: Yeah. Well, this is something I learned to do with the sourdough pancakes with my dad. Until this day I can take eggs or pancakes in a skillet and never use a spatula.
Steiger: Oh, and you just throw it over your shoulder to them?
Luck: Yeah, to my crew.
Steiger: This is just for the tape: that means throwing pancakes and eggs and all that right over your shoulder?
Luck: Show. Show. Make the turkeys pay attention.
Steiger: I don't know anything about Jack Curry. Maybe I need to hear a little background on him, what he was like, and how the hell he ever got started, or any of that.
Luck: He made a trip with Hatch.
Steiger: And he was a professional pancake flipper?
Luck: More or less, yeah. And his wife, Betty Ann, was one of the most fantastic cooks you could ever imagine, and she set up a menu.
Steiger: But he took one trip and said, "I'm going to do this too"?
Luck: "I'm going to do it."
Steiger: Had he ever run a river before or anything?
Luck: Just with Hatch. (laughs)
Steiger: That was it.
Luck: Jack even spent nights in jail in Idaho, because of an outfitter's deal. He was going to start running up there and they put an injunction against him. The sheriff came and arrested him up in Stanley, Idaho. And they're hauling him off to jail, and Paul Thevenin and Art Fenstermacher [phonetic spellings] and a few of these guys were driving along behind him, and he's in the sheriff's car, waving to them out the back window! (chuckles) But he won this injunction against the State of Idaho, where he was allowed to run out there. He went through a lot of hell.
Steiger: I never even met him. What did he even look like? I guess I ought to go talk to him.
Luck: You take sixty pounds off me, and a bare haircut, dark. A lot of people have mistaken me for Jack Curry. He was a good football player in his high school days. Betty Ann was a cheerleader. That's how they met. And they were very, very kind to me -very kind.
Steiger: Was he that way to everybody? Was he a pretty good kind of guy? pretty straight shooter?
Luck: Unless they stepped on his toes. He was very generous.
Steiger: I wonder what it was that made him want to start the company and drew him to the river, after just one trip.
Luck: There's only one person that can answer that.
Steiger: Him.
Luck: Yup. Thanks to Jack and Betty Ann, I've got to see a lot of country that I never would have, met a lot of people I never would have. Just damned-good people. He thought enough of my driving ability that I taught his three oldest how to drive.
Steiger: His kids?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: Well, how did you go about figuring it out, then? What happened after your second trip, and how did you learn? I mean, did you have to figure most everything out for yourself?
Luck: People like Dave McKay, Art Gallanson [phonetic spellings]. See, McKay and I have become very, very close friends. And he knew about me running motorcycles and flying airplanes and racing automobiles and this shit. He knew that I had a very astute rate of closure vision. And he knew that I knew how to respond. And so McKay -between he and Gallanson -and I think it was mostly McKay. . . . McKay's a brilliant man, very smart. The sonofabitch has got a shoebox full of degrees. He would design these things and try to compute the inertia and everything moving you into a point, from the river current, the power of the engine, and the whole bit. And most of these back-down runs, McKay conceived in his mind. And at that time we had another guy working with us, Dr. Buck Boren [phonetic spelling].
Steiger: So McKay was working for Curry?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And when you say "designed these things," you mean McKay was the guy that figured out the runs?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: But you designed the boats, didn't you?
Luck: No, Paul Thevenin designed the boat, and then Bryce Mackey and I started adding into the original design to where it would support the load, which became heavier every year, you know.
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: But McKay would think these things out. The sonofabitch lay awake at night, worrying over stuff this way. "Okay, Jake," he'd say, "what do you think of this? You come in here, and you start shooting left. Then you bring your bow just off that gravel bar, over on the left side, and he come in from the right. You're building up a little speed, and when your bow comes by that gravel bar, you pitch that sonofabitch hard right, and you turn around and theoretically, you should be able to power off the rocks over on the left side." That's Twenty-five Mile, that's in the big hole. He said, "Can you do it?" I said, "I'll tell you in about five minutes, Dave." (laughs)
Steiger: So he hadn't tried it either?
Luck: No, no, he'd just dreamed it up.
Steiger: But he wanted you to go first?
Luck: Well, who else? I had all this damned background: severe crashes, or avoiding a severe crash. And if I made it, then Bucky would try it. In the back-down run in Twenty-five Mile, and Crystal and so on down the line. For the most part, Dave McKay dreamed it up, Bucky and I initiated it. Were you aware of that?
Steiger: No. But I know that when I started, which was way late in the game -1971, 1972 and stuff -you were famous, and McKay was. . . .
Luck: Aw, what do you mean, "famous"? We were just guys doing a job.
Steiger: But there were maybe five or six guys that you could say, "Those are the best guys doing this." Nowadays, there's a million people that know how to do it. But back then, you'd say, "Those guys know how to do it."
Luck: Well, I'm still teaching young men how to do shit (chuckles): how to cut a curve on a bow of a boat, how to make the numbers do the work for them. Is that wrong?
Steiger: No.
Luck: Well, that's where I learned from, was old people. You heard Joe say that a while ago.
Steiger: So the crew down there, is you and Dave McKay and Buck Boren and. . . .
Luck: Jim Hudson, Amil Quayle, and several others.
Steiger: Well did Curry run very many trips as a boatman?
Luck: Quite a number.
Steiger: And was he pretty good to drive a boat? If you don't want to say, it's okay.
Luck: We'll put it this way: On oars, he was poetry in motion. On a motorboat, he couldn't drive a sharp stick in a pig's ass.
Steiger: Well those are tricky motorboats to run, too, boy. Well, I don't know, because I never got to drive a Western boat.
Luck: That J-rig is the most maneuverable big boat on the river.
Steiger: A lot quicker than, say, Falany's boat? I drove one of them.
Luck: A lot quicker. See, what I'd do when I had to make a quick maneuver, I'd just move my people back, and brought that C.G. [ed: center of gravity] back closer to the engine. And then those front tubes would just set out there and float, and you could just fan that __________ one way to the other, you know. I mean, it was so goddam quick you would oversteer -you would way oversteer, it's that quick.
Steiger: I'll be darned.
Luck: Okay, no bow weight, and your C.G. is right back about fifteen feet in front of the engine, so it's quick, quick, quick. Hell, you can turn that sonofabitch on a dime and give you back change.
Steiger: Pretty good, pretty stable boat, boy.
Luck: I think Paul done good.
Steiger: Well, I wish I'd have got to drive one. How long did it take old Curry to get big? When you guys started out, was it a pretty small company? Or did it seem like he got big pretty quick?
Luck: Quite quick.
Steiger: I wonder what caused that. Was he really good at working at it and selling it?
Luck: He was good at advertisement. He at that time was putting out the best brochure, by far -wide circulation. He had good people working for him. One of his big stays was a guy by the name of Tom Menasco down in the L.A. area, a fireman, and he advertised this among firemen, police departments, Boy Scouts, and so on down the line.
Steiger: Was he a pretty serious Mormon?
Luck: Jack? Oh yeah.
Steiger: He was involved in the Church and all that?
Luck: He was on the First Council of Seventy.
Steiger: I don't know what that is.
Luck: It's pretty far up.
Steiger: So you gotta be real serious about it.
Luck: You gotta be real serious about it. He rode from Vernal to Salt Lake with Bryce Mackey and me, and he was sitting in the middle, both of us smoking. He had to make one of these Council meetings. He said, "What the hell you guys doing to me? I'm going to go in there smelling like smoke, and these people are going to pick up on me! They're going to think I'm back to smoking again!"
Steiger: Oh, because he had done it, huh?
Luck: Oh yeah. Curry smoked. In fact, he drank the same brand of whiskey I do.
Steiger: Jim Beam?
Luck: Uh-huh. How'd you know that?
Steiger: Because Denoyer told me. I already got this bottle here [Old Bushmills], or I would have got that.
Luck: You came loaded against me, didn't you?
Steiger: (laughs) No, but I just figured.
Luck: You're taking after your daddy -you're a goddam politician.
Steiger: No sir! I just figured a guy's gotta do his homework, which I don't do that much of it.
Luck: Well, I think you know me well enough now, that if a guy's in earnest with me, I'm going to be there.
Steiger: Well, I am.
Luck: If he tries to bullshit me around, his ass is grass and I'm going to be the lawnmower. There's a lot of this bullshit now you don't need to [record].
Steiger: Well, that don't matter. That's what this stuff is for. Well, ____________ I screw up every now and then. One of the things that I wanted to do was put some of this stuff in the newsletter, in the River Guides' deal, since we got this grant. For a while there, I was just doing them. I'd do people and we'd stick 'em in there. But I'm going to try to go talk to a whole bunch of people, so it'll just dribble out through the newsletter, or whatever. And just from doing it, I've already said the wrong thing -I've kind of already made some people mad, but I never will do it deliberately. (chuckles) I swear I'll do the best I can with it.
Luck: I'll tell you one of the dearest friends I ever had in my life was Georgie White.
Steiger: What was it like meeting her? How did that happen?
Luck: Oh, God, I don't really remember. I do remember when we pulled over to the Ferry with the rig and Toby Tobias would be with me. Georgie would have rubber scattered from hell to breakfast. I just pulled my truck up and stopped. Never said a word to anybody, I'd just go over to the little store and buy a case of beer. That old woman seen me going over to the store. When I got back, all of her rubber was out of the way and I had a place to rig. (chuckles) Toby looked at me, "How'd you do that?" I used to carry Georgie cold beer and ice and stuff, drop it off at her camps when she was below Lava Falls where I usually unloaded, or whatever. I'd pull into her camp. She knew I dearly loved blackberry brandy, and back then I was running two engines on that J-rig, mostly running alone. I could get it up on the step.
Steiger: You'd unload everybody at Whitmore and then double up?
Luck: Whitmore or Lava. Pump it up to where it was hard as concrete. Then I could get it up on plane [hydroplane]. I've checked it out, on five-mile stretches, I was averaging a little over twenty-three miles per hour.
Steiger: Whoa!
Luck: I'd come whistling into her camp, and she' be standing out there. There'd be four or five of these great big diesel-burning firemen, to secure my boat. Some sweet-looking little thing in a bikini standing there with a Sierra cup with dark liquid in it. I'd step down off the bow of the boat and just as I was in mid-air, that old woman would reach out and give me a gut-shot. Just bowled me over. "Georgie, goddammit, one of these days you're going to kill me!" I'd just fall forward into her arms and she'd give me a big hug. If I had somebody with me, she'd say, "Jake, you look like you need a cup of coffee," and hand me that cup of blackberry brandy. (chuckles) If somebody was with me, you know, tales do get back.
Steiger: Oh, because you weren't supposed to be drinking then?
Luck: Oh, no! Unt-uh!
Steiger: And nobody did on the trips, pretty much?
Luck: Oh yeah!
Steiger: People did?
Luck: Oh yeah.
Steiger: But it was just passengers? They could?
Luck: Yeah, they could. Yet I was expected to set out there and play the guitar for them and sing.
Steiger: But not drink.
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: I didn't realize -so you'd play guitar and sing and all that stuff?
Luck: Used to, yeah.
Steiger: Was that something you just did? You used to play before you. . . .
Luck: Oh yeah. I got with a kid in Korea that started me on the guitar. Then I went from the guitar to the banjo to the fiddle to the mandolin, trombone, piano.
Steiger: And learned how to play all them?
Luck: I've given it all up. Yeah, you wouldn't believe that of those old clubhands. Are you familiar with a mandolin?
Steiger: Not really, but I know it's little bitty.
Luck: It's got eight strings on a neck that wide, like an inch. I was down at Dooley's Bar one night and a bunch of us yokels were around there. People were starved to death for entertainment back then. There was an old cowboy out on the strip that played the fiddle real good. Several guitar pickers. I'm standing down there, leanin' agin' the bar, thumping away on this mandolin, and all of us are going -some people dancing, some people just listening, and everybody's buying us whiskey. One of the Kaibab drivers walked up, looked at me, kind of staggered a little bit and said, "You can't do that." I said, "What do you mean I can't do that?" He said, "Your fingers are too fuckin' big!" (laughter) You know, it was good times back then. Saturday night we'd keep the place open down there 'til closing time, run everybody out, and a few of us that liked to thump on stuff that way, we'd hang around there. By about three o'clock in the morning, why, we'd be down to doing the hymns (laughter), realizing it was Sunday morning. Those were the good times. You can't do that now.
Steiger: The river rats seemed like just getting down there was really getting away in those times. I mean, in the late sixties, it seemed like. I mean, I even thought it was when I started, although it wasn't, relatively, I know.
Luck: You were asking me about knowing anything about geology? You want to know who inspired me to start studying geology?
Steiger: Absolutely.
Luck: Are you familiar with the name of Dr. Corbett Thigpen?
Steiger: Nope.
Luck: Are you familiar with the movie and the book called "The Three Faces of Eve"? Joanne Woodward's first time out. She got an Academy Award. Okay, Doc Thigpen made four trips through the Canyon with me, and he was an amateur geologist. And he started asking me about geology. I didn't know shit from Kaibab limestone. And he got perturbed with me, "By God, you ought to know that, boy!" And I said, "Sir, I'm sorry." He said, "I'll be back in a couple of years, and by God, I want you to know what these formations are!" (laughter) And by God, I did.
Steiger: Now, what did he have to do with that movie?
Luck: He wrote the book. He was the shrink that treated that woman. And he was an amazing man. He was wanting to get through med school, so he was going to do it as a professional wrestler. Well, Man Mountain Dean gathered him up by his goddamn heels and wrapped his neck around a ringpost. Severe cervical damage.
Steiger: He was going to get through medical school being a professional wrestler? And it was for real then?
Luck: It was for real. It was a no bullshit thing. He decided that was not his ball of wax, and so he became a slight of hand artist. This man is good.
Steiger: On his way to being a psychiatrist?
Luck: Yeah, one of the leading psychiatrists in the nation. And I've seen this man stand there and do slight of hand in swimming trunks only. Cards laying on the ground, and telling what card they are. They showed a card, and he said, "That's your card." They'd turn it over, and he'd say, "Goddamn I must have been drinking too much!" And they'd lay it back down. Mind you, this man is standing there in swimming trunks, standing upright at all times. And they'd lay the card back down. He'd say, "Goddamn I must have been drinking too much. Marcie are you sure that's the card?" And she'd pick it up, and the second time she turned it over, it was the goddamn card he called! (chuckles) [B's comment--that's slight of foot, not slight of hand!] That kind of stuff, you know. The man was good, Lew.
Steiger: Well how long had you been doing it before you run into him?
Luck: I met him in probably 1970. (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: I sort of always have had kind of a thumbnail knowledge of it -enough to get kind of the basic gist across. You know whatever is the standard line in the time. But I never did learn the secret code language or any of that. I try, for interpretation, I've just tried to grasp the big concepts and then lay them out there in a way that's kind of accessible. But I haven't done as much homework as I should have, that's for sure. And I'm not near as good at it -I never took a course or anything -I'm not near as good at it as a bunch of these guys are.
Luck: I never took any formal training, but I did have the benefit of taking people like Bob Sharp, Gene Schoemaker, Leon Silver [phonetic spelling], down there, and they pointed out things to me to dazzle Dr. Thigpen with.
Steiger: And those guys are all geologists, obviously, huh?
Luck: Cal Tech's finest.
Steiger: Well, before that, before this Dr. Thigpen came along, did the other guys -McKay or any of those other guys running for Curry -did anybody think about that very much?
Luck: McKay thought about it, Art Gallanson thought about it. But nothing was really ever done about it, that I was aware of.
Steiger: Where, "Gee, we ought to be able to name the rocks," and all that.
Luck: Which was a requirement with Henry Falany. He used to have a more-or-less resident geologist on board. If one wasn't there, I had to stand-in for him. I got really interested in it. Were you aware that there's an nonconformity between the Supai and the Red Wall?
Steiger: No.
Luck: There's a missing member.
Steiger: (laughs) No, I didn't know that.
Luck: There is a missing member.
Steiger: I'll be damned.
Luck: It's called the Chester Formation.
Steiger: I never heard a damn thing about that. And that shows up every now and then?
Luck: The way it shows up is, you get down around Twenty-two Mile, the camp on the left. You see these big boulders of a conglomerate-type material. Okay, that is re-cemented members of the Chester Formation. And if you walk on up the canyon, right at the juncture between the Red Wall and the Supai, you can see where this stuff has been washed down through.
Steiger: And that's where?
Luck: At Twenty-two Mile.
Steiger: Is that where that rockslide was? There was a beach there for a long time, and then. . . .
Luck: Something might have happened since I was there. There was a good-sized camp there.
Steiger: Yeah, and then a rockslide kind of covered it up. It's just below Indian Dick Rapid? Below there on the left?
Luck: Just above. You can see Indian Dick from it.
Steiger: Okay.
Luck: Indian Richard. Okay, you look in among those rocks, and you'll see where this stuff has been re-cemented, and that's remnants of what was called the Chester Formation.
Steiger: So there's a little gap there in time?
Luck: Yeah, like maybe a million years.
Steiger: The first time you went. . . . You know how it kind of gets to people spiritually and all that stuff? I mean, people go down the river, especially when somebody gives you a little bit of geology, you're kind of forced to think about the origins of the whole deal and all that stuff. It kind of takes you out there on that religious train of thought. Did any of that happen your very first time? Did any of that strike you or anything? Or was it just a matter of trying to survive? You probably didn't have time to even think about that.
Luck: Oh, trying to survive and keep everybody fed and not kill anybody, or hurt anybody.
Steiger: Probably not just the first time, but the first several times.
Luck: This is true. I'll tell you what, Lew, I'm very proud of my record. I've never had to evacuate an accident victim. Of course I've only got 147 trips through Grand.
Steiger: That's a hell of a record!
Luck: I evacuated one of my crew because he was coming down with the flu, and I didn't want to spread it. That's the only. . . . I never had to evacuate an accident. I have evacuated accident victims for other people, but never my own.
Steiger: That's a hell of a deal! I've been on trips where I haven't seen that many people hurt on the water, but. . . .
Luck: It's on the bank.
Steiger: Yeah, we've sure had them fall on the trail. I mean, I probably see, an average, I'd say, of a couple of people a year, that fell somewhere or something happened to them somehow.
Luck: Back during the shigella outbreak I was running the goddam ambulance through the Lower Canyon out to Temple Bar. Load up these puking, shitting, crying people up. These people would see me coming screaming by, running those two engines, and they'd wave me in. They'd say, "Get these folks to T-Bar quick."
Steiger: Was that the early seventies? I remember Whale [phonetic spelling] and some of them guys were getting that.
Luck: Yup. And I still maintain it came out of that sewage spill that Page had over there, where the yellow streak still runs down the wall.
Steiger: I don't know, maybe that was before my time, but I remember there was a big bunch of stuff going on about all of that, but we never had too much trouble there with Fred and them. I don't know, I guess that was kind of the luck of the draw.
Luck: I never had anybody get sick. I never got sick. And I hauled all these sickies out. I'm pretty proud of that, Lew.
Steiger: Well and rightfully so. Never evacuated somebody. That's a hell of a deal. How did you. . . .
Luck: I don't swim, so I drive a boat real goddam careful.
Steiger: How do you watch out for them on the beach?
Luck: I tell them what to expect, and how to handle it. But I have had to scale walls at two o'clock in the goddam morning and set up there until it got light enough to make a descent, with somebody that was ledged up, panicked. I could go up, but I couldn't come down in the dark. You're looking at a fat old man now and saying, "How'd that sonofabitch ever climb. . . ."
Steiger: Oh, I don't say that, because I. . . .
Luck: You remember me back when I weighed about 170 pounds.
Steiger: I remember you when you were a big, tough, strong sonofabitch, and you don't look that far off from that right now, either, for that matter.
Steiger: Well, this problem that I've had is really dragging me down. I don't have the strength I used to. The last time I made a power lift was about four years ago, down there at the shop, just to show my crew, impress them: 1,127 pounds.
Steiger: Holy moley! That's like a bench press or something like that?
Luck: No, you get your back and shoulders up agin' an object, and then you're using your arms and your legs.
Steiger: That's a hell of a lot of [weight].
Luck: The most I ever lifted with my arms this way was 700. (chuckles) Just cleared the floor with it. When I was seventeen years old, on a bet, I picked up 417 pounds and carried it 100 feet.
Steiger: What was that? Was that a set of weights or something?
Luck: No, it was a piece of drill pipe. Ed Carpenter said I couldn't pick the sonofabitch up, and I said for fifty dollars I'll carry it the length of this building. I took his fifty dollars. I was seventeen. But I'm bragging about me again.
Steiger: Well, that doesn't really sound like bragging to me. That sounds like a descriptive. . . .
Luck: I was a powerful man. Very, very powerful.
Steiger: Well, and still are.
Luck: Well, not what I used to be. Like that old man that was just here. He passed sixty years old, he said, "I never knew going downhill could be this goddam tough!" (chuckles)
Steiger: Well, what gets me is how fast it all goes. I mean, last time I looked around, I was about nineteen years old. And now I'm thirty-eight! You know, I really meant to get a lot more done.
Luck: When I was thirty-eight, I was right in the prime of my river running.
Steiger: Yeah. So how old were you when you started, about? Late twenties?
Luck: No, thirty-four, thirty-five. See, we're going back a long ways, even then. Oh, earlier than that, probably early thirties.
Steiger: And you'd done all this hard work through the Depression, and then gone off to war. When you got back from the war, is that when you were doing all this racing? I mean, what happened between Korea and getting to the river?
Luck: Oh, I started racing. Then I went to work for an oil field service company. We did a lot of what they called hydro-frac-ing [phonetic spelling] where they pump fluids down a well, under a lot of pressure. When we first started it was not a lot of sand. And the theory was, you'd break the formation open, creating a fracture back to it. The process was called hydrofrac. Once you fractured the formation and started taking fluid. . . .
[BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Okay, this is Tape 2, the GCRG River Runners Oral History Project, Lew Steiger and Jake Luck on May 2, 1994, here in Kanab, in Jake's orchard in his side yard.
Luck: The process with this was to increase the production of these wells. The theory was, it created that fracture back in the formation. Then you pump this slurry of jelled material -preferably jelled oil -back into the formation with this coarse sand. And then pump all of this out of the tubing, back into the formation, displace it out of the tubing with a crude oil. Then when you relaxed the pressure, this formation could not come back together, and it gave you a permeable slot, through which the oil could flow into the well. It was pretty high technology back then in the fifties. And then part of our bit was blow-out and firefighting.
Steiger: Firefighting for the wells? for the drilling deals? That kind of stuff?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And that was all happening in Utah, right around there?
Luck: No, back at that time I was oscillating all the way from the Texas panhandle to the Canadian border with an outfit called Halliburton.
Steiger: No shit! Was that the famous guy?
Luck: You're talking about Red Adair?
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: I met him twice. I was on two fires with him. The second one, the man went over to my boss and said, "You got enough people here to get this boy's truck to town? I'm taking him to dinner." The reason for that being, I spent three days and nights out on this blow-out fire. I mean, we had fires all over everywhere. It hit high pressure gas and it was coming up around the surface casing and anywhere you wanted to drop a match, the goddam sand would probably catch fire. We were pumping a mixture of cement and Calseal -which accelerates the setting of cement -mixing it with a nine-pound brine. In seven minutes, it would set up to where you could walk on it. Thirty-three thousand sacks of cement, 33,000 sacks of Calseal, and three days and nights, going in, pump a stage, wait four hours, and go in again. I was going in there in one of these old asbestos suits, people squirting water on me, and I was being steamed, making connections on this wellhead and breaking connections -twice every four hours. It would take me about twenty minutes to pump this mixture -mix it up and pump it in. Then I'd have to suit up, go in, break the connection to get it out of the goddam _______ before they set up.
Steiger: (whistles "whew")
Luck: Yeah, all for $1.37 an hour!
Steiger: And that's in the fifties?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: Well so the river. . . .
Luck: Where Red took me to dinner, it was down in a little place called Canadian, Texas.
Steiger: I wonder how it ever got named "Canadian." Maybe there must have been somebody down there that. . . . And that was a big fire?
Luck: It was a pretty good blaze. It wasn't that it was just one, you know -not like some I've seen where they come billowing up out of the goddam thing, and the steel derrick would melt in three to four minutes and fall to the ground. It was just a lot of little fires oozing up through. It was not that high a volume, but it was high pressure. And the guy that owned the well came out there after we had it down to just a couple of little bitty deals. This was funnier than hell to me. He's on a bawling drunk. We're setting around there roasting wieners over these last remaining little blazes, waiting for Red to say it was time for the next stage. And [the well owner] came out there and he's on a bawling drunk, and he said, "This morning they called me and they said 'Mr. Phillips, by five o'clock this morning we've spent over $20,000 of your money, and it's still going down at a horrendous rate.'" (laughter) It was about this time of night when we finally got everything put out, and Red went over and told them about it. He said, "I'm taking this boy to dinner." I was just a kid.
Steiger: How was dinner?
Luck: Good.
Steiger: He must have been something else, to figure out how to do all that stuff.
Luck: He's one smart sonofabitch. Back then, we were still using nitroglycerin to shoot off the pipe or perforate the wells, or whatever, you know, in the ___________ zone. They were just coming into the advent of the bullet gun that went down and shot these 50-calibre, armor-piercing slugs out through the casing and through the cement around the casing. It was a bit tricky to swing a jar of nitroglycerine down a well. I still remember having to tie a jar of it on No. 9 wire.
Steiger: So the idea is, if you could get a big enough bang, you could blow that sonofabitch out?
Luck: No, this was to put the well on production.
Steiger: This was just to get it going?
Luck: Yeah, you had to perforate the pipe some way. In the early years, you blew a hole in the sonofabitch, and they used nitroglycerine. And then these people came up with the idea where they could take this what they call a bullet gun, loaded with 50-calibre, armor-piercing slugs and lower it down there on a wire line to where they got the permeable zone, where they figure they were going to be able to produce. They'd lower it to that point, and then they would electronically detonate this thing and it would shoot all these holes out.
Steiger: And just whatever direction?
Luck: Oh yeah. The forerunner on this was McCullough [phonetic spelling] Tool.
Steiger: Well, what was it like getting on the river after all that kind of activity?
Luck: It was just another exciting experience. (chuckles) Alright? I've not always been a mundane old, sit-down-and-draw-it-out, weld-it-out, cut-it-up sonofabitch.
Steiger: But it sounds like the river wasn't that. . . . It was just "business as usual."
Luck: Bullshit! It was another unknown, back then. For me to negotiate a rapid that Shorty Burton died in, safely, was another hallmark in my life, because I respected Shorty. You didn't know I knew the man personally?
Steiger: No, but when you say it, it makes sense, because he was right there.
Luck: My little sister put his oldest daughter the rest of the way through high school. His oldest daughter went and lived with my youngest sister. She helped get her through school.
Steiger: Kenton told me that Shorty taught him how to bake biscuits, and got him started too -Kenton Grua.
Luck: I watched Kenton grow up. Were you aware of that?
Steiger: No, but it makes sense -and Bart Henderson, too, for that matter, probably.
Luck: This is true. Now Kenton's dad bought my ex-daddy-in-law's property. Old Tom Grua was a hell of a guy, I'll tell you. I don't know whether he's still alive or not.
Steiger: No, he isn't. I remember when he died and Kenton had to get off a trip to go to the funeral.
Luck: The last time I saw Kenton, Tom was still alive. So you see, there ain't that much to me.
Steiger: [Yeah, sure!] Did you go down there right after Shorty had died and all?
Luck: Not that long. Amil Quayle almost met the same type of fate, there at Upset. He flipped one doing exactly the same thing Shorty done.
Steiger: Was that a Hatch boat, a tail-dragger?
Luck: The same type of thing.
Steiger: What did Shorty do?
Luck: He just got hung up.
Steiger: Did he hit that thing straight and everything? I've heard that he just kind of went down there straight, and just lined her up and hit the hole straight, and it just. . . .
Luck: No, that ain't Shorty's type of run. He just missed.
Steiger: He was trying to cut it? Yeah.
Luck: You might not want to make this public. . . . (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: So Shorty Burton was forty-four and a day?
Luck: Yeah, when he died. He celebrated his forty-fourth birthday just below Deer Creek on the left, just below on that big beach.
Steiger: I wonder if he saw it coming, if he had any kind of feeling about it or any of that.
Luck: You'd have to talk to Shorty.
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: It destroyed Ruth when he died.
Steiger: Ruth was his wife?
Luck: Yeah, she's a lovely lady.
Steiger: Yeah, my sister was married to a pilot who crashed in Alaska. So you started there in 1967. Or you saw it in 1967, and then started out in 1968.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And you worked for Curry until the late seventies or something, somewhere in there?
Luck: Uh-huh. No, early seventies.
Steiger: And then for Falany.
Luck: Uh-huh. And off and on between Waterman.
Steiger: And pretty much went steady until the mid-eighties or somewhere in there, wasn't it?
Luck: No. I was pretty much tied up with Waterman welding by then.
Steiger: So it was the sixties through 'til the late seventies?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: Did you do that trip where you guys hauled the backhoes down there and all that?
Luck: I was invited on that trip, but being as I was working for Dean Waterman at the time, he elected he'd go and leave me home.
Steiger: So that was Waterman and. . . .
Luck: Bill George.
Steiger: Oh hell, I thought that was you and him.
Luck: No. No, Dean and I designed and built up the framework to carry this stuff, and Dean went. He envisions himself as a better boat driver than I. (chuckles) We've all got that ego thing to fight, right?
Steiger: Yeah. Well, you gotta think you're good.
Luck: You probably think you're better than I, right?
Steiger: No, I wouldn't say that. I think I can drive a motorboat. I mean, let me put it this way: If I can stand there, I think I can do whatever kind of run I can watch you do.
Luck: Well, I'll tell you what, ________________ a lot of ________, but when it comes to a jet boat, I ain't going to take a back seat to too many people. Dean Waterman and I built up a jet boat years ago. One of the old guys down on Lake Mead, old Mac Miller and Jess Gaddis [phonetic spelling] were with the Hamilton [phonetic spelling] bunch, around, and they learned how to make one of these 40 mph, length-of-the-boat bootlegger turns and come back. The taught me how to do this. And so when we built that jet boat and took it out on Lake Powell, Waterman said, "You want to drive this sonofabitch?" "Yeah, I'd like to Dean." I run it around there and got the feel of it a little bit. I said, "Dean, can I show you some neat shit with this boat of yours?" I had it down, feeling it. He said, "Sure." I said, "Alright, you get ahold of that goddam seat and you try to pull it out of the bottom of the floor." "What are you talking about?" I said, "Just do what I say." Hell, I got him and his kid and Scott Dunn -two of Dean's boys -we're just out for a lark ____________. Waterman looked at me like, "you silly old shit." I said, "Dean, you got a good pull up on that seat?" He didn't answer -he's deaf anyway. We're running along about 30-35 mph and I just swapped ends with that bitch and headed back the other way. Dean about half-way fell out of his seat. Everybody else was setting tight. Scott Dunn's eyes are big as saucers. We went on up, pulled into a little bit of a spit of sand out in the middle of the lake. They're out there fixing us some lunch. So I go out with Dean's oldest boy, Russell. Got him out on the lake, showed him how to do this. It's simple. All you do is, you're running a straight course down the lake, and you let off the throttle, crank it hard whichever way, stomp the goddam throttle, and start unwinding it, back to a straight course. That sonofabitch will just swap ends on you and head back the other way. Well, I watch Russell make half-a-dozen of these things out there -we're out of sight of these guys. Where we camped is back up in this little bit of a cove, and it runs in a narrow channel and right into a wall. I got off the boat, let Russell take it, and he's out of sight of us, but I can hear about what's going on. I know he's practicing these goddam quick turnarounds, length-of-himself turnarounds, in a jet boat. And sonofabitch, he must have figured he had it down pat. Here this kid comes, right up through this narrow slot, right into this wall, just balls-to-the-wall, and it looks like there's no way he's going to stop. And he snapped one of these sonofabitching turnarounds. It made my gut roll over! And he came out of there dead perfect, right back through that narrow slot. The top of Dean Waterman's head is purple -I mean his bloodpressure is. . . . And he whirled on me and said, "You sonofabitch! Don't you ever show one of my kids any more of that kind of bullshit!" This went on for years. Then Dean went to New Zealand, and he saw that everybody there was doing that. All of a sudden it became the thing to do and he learned how to do it! (laughter) You don't need to let Dean Waterman read that one either!
Steiger: Okay. Boy, that's a hell of a boat he's building. God, that thing is amazing. That's a big son of a gun. Nobody else has lifted a finger on that thing?
Luck: Hardly anybody. His cousin out of Alaska came down here and helped him with it.
Steiger: That's stubborn.
Luck: This is something you can print: What I know about boat building, Dean Waterman inspired. That's the truth.
Steiger: He's got a knack for it?
Luck: Well, evidently he saw a knack in me too, or he would not have given of his time to show me. Between he and I, I think we've come a long ways in work boat design.
Steiger: Do you want to talk about the whole -just the best boats going -I mean, the river boat, that whole thing. That whole aluminum basket thing and just the way that's evolved. That's so much better than those early boats.
Steiger: You like the way they fit together?
Luck: Oh, it's just. . . . The only mystery to me is that anybody could see one of those and not instantly realize that that's it right there. The only thing I don't understand is, how anybody could still be running any other thing, than that stuff.
Luck: You guys never had any problem pinning or unpinning boxes?
Steiger: Not really. Well you mean because they bound up and stuff?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: Well, most of my time was ARR. I guess I have seen those Ron Smith boxes bind up a little bit. But to me, just that. . . .
Luck: I mean, on GCE trips you never had. . . . (coughing spell)
Steiger: Oh, on this one, no. No, we didn't have a problem.
Luck: Everything fit together?
Steiger: Everything was totally slick.
Luck: ____________________________ argued everything was _______________.
Steiger: Oh no, it was. It's nice stuff.
Luck: What did you think of that ice box design?
Steiger: Seemed just fine to me.
Luck: Did you like the way that lid fit down in on that taper?
Steiger: All that stuff seemed real. . . .
Luck: I'm the fucking carpenter that built that.
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: I didn't just design it, I built it, because I don't have _______________ down there yet. ___________ compound angles.
Steiger: Yeah. Well, that stuff is going to just be there forever. The amazing thing about all that equipment. . . .
Luck: That lid is right fucking air-tight, too, isn't it?
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: That twelve-degree slope going in. Bragging on me again. You still got that sonofabitch [ed: the tape recorder] running?
Steiger: Yes I do.
Luck: Why?
Steiger: Well, just because I figure that's my job. I mean, for whatever that means.
Luck: I'll tell you what, Lew, each and every one of these companies come to us, and they've got their own little secretive ideas, and we try to keep it that way. And before I will impart anything that I have thought of, for somebody like GCE, to anybody else, I will call them and ask their permission. To me I think it keeps a decent rapport with these people. They come to me and say, "Hey, you know, we'd like this and do this." But I design it. Or Scott and I design it.
Steiger: What amazes me is just how far all that stuff has come. I mean, it's the space age, compared to, it seems like to me, what it was even when I started. Well, working for Fred, I mean that old stuff, there was the cotton in the middle and the wood. You know, all that stuff. Now it's nylon and aluminum. The rigs are so much more stable and so much easier. Well, just that design is so much better than that early stuff -it's just amazing. Now I don't know, because I never drove a J-rig. I guess they haven't really changed those rigs all that much, that I can tell. I guess they've made some changes.
Luck: Well, they went back and retried shit that we tried earlier, found it wouldn't work.
Steiger: Well, when you look at this whole deal -well, just at river running -there's some other kind of "big picture" things that it's probably important to touch on. One of them is just how it evolved, like how you saw it evolve between the time that you started, and then through the time you were doing it hot and heavy, to where when you kind of left off running. What happened in that span of time?
Luck: I was back on the old wooden frame bit, hanging over the back end, slickerin'. I run those. I'll never do it again.
Steiger: Was that for Hatch?
Luck: Uh-huh. No, it was for Curry.
Steiger: Oh, he started with tail-draggers?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And then Paul Thevenin said, "Why don't you put these other things. . . ."
Luck: Well, how this came about, was Carry was able to buy a bunch of these surplus snout boats -you know, the old pontoons -just kind of an off-the-wall thing. I've drove trucks over those sonsofbitches over in Korea.
Steiger: You were using them?
Luck: Oh yeah! There's a place over there called "the Murderer's Mile." We had to drop down in and run across this goddam flotation bridge. Quite a deal. Thevenin came up with the idea of cutting out a section here, and sewing it together there with a baseball stitch, and then running it ______________ (comment obscured by siren, tape turned off and on, aside about siren not transcribed).
Steiger: Well, just the way that trips changed and stuff. . . . I mean, when I think about evolution, there's the equipment, and then the kind of people that were coming, and then just what the "show" was. To me, I don't know why, but it seems like it's important to ask about how all that stuff evolved, and then the government. It seems important to touch on all those things, if for no other reason than to, I don't know, maybe do it better in the future, or keep it from getting any worse: hang onto what's the best of what the Canyon is. Or the best of what that experience is for those people that go down there.
Luck: Well, the thing that kind of irritates me about this, back when I was raised up, a man made a camp, that was his domain, that was his castle. And if anybody wanted to come in and visit, they asked permission. They definitely asked permission, because for that night, by God, that's his home, that's his domicile. That is his private piece of property.
Steiger: This is on the river, or this is anywhere?
Luck: Anywhere, anywhere. You did not ride into an old cowboy's camp and start demanding this or that or whatever, or you're going to die, right now, no questions asked.
Steiger: And that's the way it was.
Luck: That's the way it was. I can remember those times. It didn't matter [if] you were a Forest Service official, a game warden, or whatever -they rode up on that man's camp, they asked permission to light [ed: get down off their horse]. And if it was denied, they'd better, by God, be hoofing it and come back with a warrant. You follow what I'm saying?
Steiger: Yeah, I do, I think. And that wasn't just the Mormons, that was everybody. That was just the way it was.
Luck: That was the U.S. Forest Service, Utah Fish and Game. . . .
Steiger: If somebody was out, camped, that was their territory?
Luck: This is true. It's the same as their home. You did not just come in, jump off the goddam boat and start riffling through their belongings, unless you had reason.
Steiger: Yeah. Well, you know, I guess the hard part. . . .
Luck: Hitler was the one who perpetuated this thing. Now you talk about socialism, Naziism, communism -whatever -that's what we're going into. Our government is trying to shove this down our throats, show us that they are the awe-instilling power. We don't need this.
Steiger: Why is it that that's happening?
Luck: Because too many people sat around on their fat asses and let it happen. Too many people are unwilling to fight. Am I wrong?
Steiger: Well, I don't know. I just saw this movie about what happened over there in Germany, and you look at all these Jews getting herded around and stuff, and I know that it is like you say. What happens in that deal is, first they take all their stuff away from these people. . . . (tape turned off and on) Well, I just wonder, the hard part is that there's government intervention, and nine times out of ten it isn't worth a shit and it makes things worse than it was before. But I look at the Canyon: the thing that gets to me is, you look at that whole set-up and somehow there needed to be some kind of control over it. This whole country, we've moved from this time when your camp was where nobody could come in, to. . . . I mean, I don't know how you hang onto that.
Luck: Nobody could come in unless they asked to come in. Permission was never . . .
Steiger: . . . particularly denied.
Luck: Yes.
Steiger: So even if it was crowded in the Canyon, if you behaved a certain way, then you wouldn't need this other stuff.
Luck: As long as they don't act like a bunch of S.S. troops, this is fine.
Steiger: Well, we got that now to the nth degree. I mean, the whole thing is pretty skewed.
Luck: Well, these -as we call them here -"toads" are in quest of power. They've got a power mania, and they've long since [forgotten] that they are government servants and that they should be civil. Maybe you agree with me, maybe you don't, but that's my feeling. They are my employee.
Steiger: Well, I don't think they have realized, that's the thing. I think they forget that.
Luck: I am paying their goddam wages, and they are my servant, and they will be treated as "folks" if they act like folks. But when they come in trying to lord a power over me, then I become irate. And I cannot condone this. No man is better than I, no matter what color uniform, or what little badge he's wearing, he is not better than me, and I am innocent until he proves me guilty. [In his eyes] I am guilty until I prove myself innocent, which is the way they're working it now. I have to prove myself innocent. It used to be they had to prove me guilty. I run a clean camp, very clean camp. I've never had anybody evacuated under any emergency. Doing my cooking, doing my food handling, doing my boat driving, all my general management of the river: I've never had anybody injured on a hike, never had anybody injured on the boat, never had anybody come down with any illness of food mispreparation. Why these people feel they can rain down on me, I do not know.
Steiger: Was there a time when the Park was pretty reasonable? like when you started?
Luck: Indubitably. Back then they conducted themselves as civil persons. I can remember back when for forty dollars a head we were taking Park Service personnel through the Canyon.
Steiger: _______________________.
Luck: Yes. To teach them how to run a river trip, teach them how to get through the Canyon safely, to teach them how to prepare a proper diet. The government paid Curry forty dollars a head for us to train these people.
Steiger: Looking back on it, if you had to name just the best of your time down there, what was it? How would you describe that?
Luck: Oh, it was back before they started to crowd everybody through a little bitty window.
Steiger: Like back there in 1968?
Luck: Back when we ran from March through November, when we could go through the Canyon and not see that many folks. People were more disbursed because they weren't jammed through a little bitty window. Back when you'd traverse the whole Canyon without seeing another person, probably. Back when the person that you loved dearly would drop into the Canyon in an airplane, bounce a roll of toilet paper off your boat, then get on the radio and say, "Are you alright, Jake?"
Steiger: That's Leesburg? [phonetic spelling]
Luck: I ain't mentioning any names. I have a few friends that would do that.
Steiger: Yeah, I can think of another one too. I asked Michael, "God, what do I ask about?" and one of the things he said was, "Ask about getting hung up and spending the night on the rock island." I don't know if you want to talk about that.
Luck: Oh, this is true.
Steiger: He just said that was a hell of a story.
Luck: I did that, yeah. I was driving one of Curry's rigs, called the "Super J," forty-five feet long.
Steiger: That was just a design wrinkle?
Luck: Well, it was some of that, and a whole lot of pilot error.
Steiger: That's an awful long boat.
Luck: Yeah. It's all Henry Falany's fault, every bit of it.
Steiger: (chuckles) He just said, "Make the boat bigger"?
Luck: No, this thing had a stretched-out, added-onto, cotton doughnut deal. Then it had the snout tubes on the outside. It really widened out, had the typical J rig frames on it. I had met Henry up at, oh, I guess Phantom Ranch. I said, "Where do you want to camp, Henry?" He said "Oh, I'm going to go on below Crystal." And I said, "Okay, I'm going to camp at the head of Granite then." He took off, and goddam, I'm running kind of late at night. I start to pull in at the head of Granite, and there's Falany. I said, "You sonofabitch! Now where the hell am I going to camp?" So I knew Crystal was facing me, and I went on down, and like I told you before, we had come up with this back-down run and turn around. So I knew what Crystal was going to look like. So I come in at the head of it, and I pitched it to the right, and I'm gliding down along there with it pointed to the right bank, waiting on the throttle in case I needed to give it more. And all of a sudden I realized that sonofabitch was too long, and I had given it too much, and the bow of the boat grabbed a rock and spun me backwards, a long time before I wanted to be spun backwards. And I can't recover from it. It's spinning be down, out and back. I end up jammed up on a big boulder, just off the right bank.
Steiger: Oh, not the rock island?
Luck: Oh no. Oh no, right beside the big hole at the top. Right directly across it.
Steiger: I've hung up there. I hung up there the first time I ever ran that thing -right directly across from the hole, a big, kind of red, pointy round rock? (laughs)
Luck: You got that sonofabitch!
Steiger: Yeah, I nailed that thing the first run.
Luck: Okay, I'm hung-up on this thing. Well, I got a Canook [ed: Canadian] with me, a geologist by the name of Carl Narbig [phonetic spelling], tremendous man. We jump out and try to push this sonofabitch off this rock. Well the current catches him -he's upstream from me -and it starts pushing him down. And both of us are up toward the bow of the boat, and his body slams into mine, and I'm ahold of the lifeline alongside the boat, and [the impact] pulls me free of this life line -not free, but it slid from my grip. My hands slide down agin' the "D" ring, and the pain becomes so excruciating that I can't handle it any more, so I turn loose and grab for another grip, hoping it'll be less on the next one. We slide down agin' it, and the same story -I can't stand the pain in my hand with both of our bodies in that current. So I grabbed for a lower grip -we got forty-five feet here to play with -and it pushes me on down to the next one -the same story, I have to release from that one. And I grabbed the last one, and I realized, you got twenty-four people on board this fucking boat, and they're dependent upon you and Carl. So I just bit the goddam boat and hung on. By then there were enough of these people -they were from Litton Industries out of California, and several of them were return trippers, they knew the score -and they were there by that time. It seems like an eternity to you, hanging on the side of this sonofabitch, but in all probability it was just a matter of seconds. All of a sudden these people were there. I'm on the last "D" ring, I got nowhere to go but on down the creek, and then try to fight my way back and figure another way back to the boat. These faces appeared, arms started coming over the side of the boat, they snagged Carl out, then they got me. I said, "Okay, is everybody alright?" They said, "Yeah." So everybody poked fun at me for carrying a Coleman stove. So I lit up the Coleman stove, Carl and I barbecued up some chicken.
Steiger: Right there on the boat?
Luck: Right there on the boat.
Steiger: Too far to get to shore?
Luck: Oh yeah! Shit, there was a lot of fast water running by. You sure you want to hear all this bullshit?
Steiger: Yeah, if you don't mind. I mean, to me, this is absolutely. . . .
Luck: It was an incident. Prior to this, "Look" magazine was running an Indians' fashions article, and they had looked all over the area for a tall Navajo, Piute, whatever, to stand there with this good-looking French model they had, to do these Indian fashions for "Look" magazine.
Steiger: Indian fashions in the Grand Canyon?!
Luck: Curry had them. He was a day ahead of me, or two days. The gal that was running this, was a bit despaired over what they'd been able to find in the way of Indian models. [She] looked at me, being kind of dark, and said, "He'll do." Curry said, "That's good. He'll be a couple of days behind us, he'll catch us around Havasu." Alright. Well, these are return people from Litton Industries, and I've got a little lady on board that I was kind of partial to -she'd been with me before. Anyway, I came into that goddam rapid, I'm sliding down, that bow snags this rock and spun me backwards, put me on these big ones and Carl and I do this sliding-down-the-goddam-rope thing, get up on there, and we fix them all dinner. And somebody said -this was back before the days of porta-potties, "What do we do about toilet facilities?" I said, "The same as on the bank: women upstream, men downstream." Alright. I fix them up dinner, everybody got fed and they got bedded down. I'm rambling, ain't I?
Steiger: No, you're doing good, honest. Don't worry about it in the least.
Luck: I'd told them before this about how the rapid had been formed, about the flash flood. Well, along about midnight, one itty bitty cloud comes up over the top, and a few drops of rain hit the boat. And this one guy on there -he's a real paranoid, named Frank -comes back and says, "Jake, it's raining! I don't want to be washed down out of here." I said, "I don't either, Frank." This is right at midnight. The only place for me to try to get any "Zs" is down in the motor well at the back end of this thing. The lovely lady decided she would accompany that space with me. We're back in there trying to catch some sleep. We're cramped-up in this three-foot by three-foot cubicle. I'm hurting, and she's hurting -we're cramped. It's a bad scene, alright? but we are hung-up there, big time. Well, just as a point of jest: One of these guys comes back there to relieve himself off the back end of the boat, which is downstream. He's standing back there and tinkles -totally unaware of us being there. Just as he turns to leave, this little blonde-headed thing says, "Don't walk off and leave anything running." God, he almost jumped off the boat! You realize these are pretty deep, dark secrets. Well, when it started sprinkling, why this guy, Frank, comes back down there. He's all in a panic, "I don't want to be washed out of here!" I said, "Goddam, Frank, I don't either. But I'll tell you what, it's pretty evident you ain't going to sleep, and I've got to have mine, so why don't you come back and give me a report every hour, on the hour." "Okay." So the little bit of a sprinkle passes by, and just one hour, right to the quiver and a tick, he's back there, "Jake, Jake, the water's going down. The boat's starting to. . . ." "That's exactly what I want, Frank. See you at two o'clock." (sigh) Well, it's one-thirty, he's back there, "Jake, Jake! God, the water's really going down. This boat's really getting twisted." "That's good, Frank. I like that a lot." This went on down to where it was every five minutes.
[END TAPE 2, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]
Steiger: . . . dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. (glug, glug, glug of the Bushmills pouring into glasses)
Luck: Where the hell were we? Along about four o'clock in the morning, just barely breaking daylight, I got everybody up, and I set my kitchen out on the goddam rocks and started cooking breakfast, and the water started coming up. I had Narbig have all the people unload all the heavy shit that they could off the bow of the boat, and I pushed it out. And then I moved everything so the current would catch it and spin it. Back then we had to carry oars, these fifteen-foot jobbers. They were using those as pry bars, prying it over these boulders. Christ Almighty, you could nearly walk underneath the boat over the top of some of those rocks. I mean, it was a severe drop in the water. The rock that formed the hole at the top of Crystal was exposed.
Steiger: So it probably went from 15,000 cfs down to 3,000? It was that kind of deal?
Luck: Probably 1,500 cfs.
Steiger: Fifteen thousand to fifteen hundred?
Luck: That would be my guess, yeah -a severe drop. They're prying away on this boat. They got this splashboard, two-foot by eight-foot piece of plywood that we use as a table, on the bank -and a whole manner of shit. And they're prying this thing, and horsing it over, moving the heavy shit forward, trying to move the back end a little. The water started coming up and started washing the kitchen away, so we put all this shit up on the boat, went ahead with breakfast, and had one of the guys tie a rope to the bow, up to a rock up here, where when it tightened up, it would swing it to where I wanted it. And I got these people all fed: I cooked them up bacon and blueberry pancakes on my Coleman stove. I'm just finishing up eating, and I felt the boat shift. I had given this guy my knife -which I always take pride in it being pretty sharp. I told him, "When I call for it, just cut that goddam rope." I'm downing my last bite of pancakes, I felt the boat shift again, and he said, "Jake, this sonofabitch is starting to tear the boat apart." And I said, "Cut the goddam line." He hit the line and it exploded like a shot. Well, we were minus a piece of plywood and a few articles, but it didn't matter. We went on down. That goddam Johnson [ed: motor] wouldn't start!
Steiger: Hoo boy!
Luck: So I changed it, put another one on, and got it running just before we hit Tuna Creek. Got through it, went on down to Havasu, caught up with Curry, and they started laying on me what they wanted me to do about posing with this gal. They wanted me to stand up there on these hot rocks, barefooted, nothing but a breechcloth on. It's 130o ______________ you know. I said, "I don't need no part of this shit!" And Curry was over asking Carl, "How'd you do in Crystal?" "Oh," Carl says, "it was rather unique." Curry said, "Jake must have done his back-down run." Carl said, "You might say that." (laughter) But it was due to that extra length, why I snagged that rock. I just did not see it coming up. We visited people at Havasu and went on down the creek. Missed my debut in "Look" magazine, right?
Steiger: Oh well. Were you running in 1983?
Luck: Yeah!
Steiger: So you got to see all that high water and all that shit?
Luck: Got to see how Crystal washed away the hell upstream about another hundred yards -about a million cubic yards of earth moved.
Steiger: Were you right down there through all that shit? Did you see it at 70,000 cfs or after it went up there to 90,000 cfs? Or somewhere in between?
Luck: I didn't get there until it receded to 45,000 cfs.
Steiger: That was a hell of a deal. I kind of miss the old one. I mean, the new has sure got its points, but you don't realize how dynamic it all is at first, I don't think. I sure didn't. I mean, these places: Crystal and Havasu and a lot of these places change, and it seems like it always used to catch me by surprise.
Luck: That gives you an idea how all that Canyon happened, right?
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: When you start thinking about all the sediment that the Colorado River has carried. . . . What was it? 1937? the gauging station there at Phantom Ranch estimated it was carrying 27,000 cubic yards of earth every twenty-four hours.
Steiger: (whistles "whew")
Luck: That's a lot of abrasiveness.
Steiger: A cubic yard is a lot of dirt, isn't it? In 1968, what did the beaches look like? and the driftwood and all that? Do you remember that? Do you remember it changing a lot?
Luck: Oh, back then, there was enough driftwood. We cooked primarily on mesquite. There was enough dead wood and enough driftwood to where we could run our cooking fire on those.
Steiger: So you'd actually go and just gather the good wood?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: And then did you see the beaches get smaller? Or did you even notice much of that?
Luck: I saw them begin to decline, yeah -to a point, nothing spectacular, nothing earthshaking. But then I saw the decline of firewood, and I got tired of going out and trying to hustle it. So I built the propane stove type thing.
Steiger: Those blasters?
Luck: No, it was the rectangular thing. And I cooked on those for a couple of years, carrying my own propane.
Steiger: And that was just something you'd decided? "To hell with it," that's what you were going to do?
Luck: Yeah, because I'm a lazy sonofabitch, alright? I got tired of gathering firewood, got tired of asking my people to gather firewood. Became tired of not having enough firewood to cook a meal with. And this "blaster" thing you're talking about (chuckles), that was an evolution thing. What I primarily invented that thing for was a garbage disposal. See, it was a lot taller. I fluted it so it would circulate around. Then I put the propane underneath this three-foot-high tall, sixteen-inch tube. And all garbage went in that sonofabitch -wet or dry.
Steiger: Wow, and it'd do it, it'd cook it up.
Luck: And instead of me crossing the lake with all these big bagfulls of garbage, and a half-mile long string of flies following me, I had a couple little bags of ashes. That's the way my daddy taught me: the cleaner you can leave your camp, the better it's going to be for the next guy.
Steiger: And he taught you that back in the thirties?
Luck: Back in the forties.
Steiger: People looked at it like that.
Luck: Yeah, he did. All the mountain people did. Leave a clean camp. And I would come off of the river with just a couple of little bags of ashes. I mean pork chop bones, chicken bones, steak bones, were powder. Once I initiated the fire, got it going big-time, with the way I had it fluted, it would burn by itself. And people said, "Well, God, what about these folks standing around the stench of this burning garbage?" I said, "A fire is a fire. People are attracted to a fire. If they don't like the smell, they'll move to the other side of the goddam fire." (laughs) Right?
Steiger: Yeah, that's right, and that's true.
Luck: Once I got it really going, it would melt it down. Cantaloupe rinds, everything that way.
Steiger: There was always a propane feed in there?
Luck: No, once you really got it established. . . .
Steiger: It'd just suck air?
Luck: You could stop the propane.
Steiger: Had a little grate in the middle of it or something?
Luck: Yeah. And this thing would melt an aluminum beer can down in ten seconds.
Steiger: (whistles "whew") (tape shut off and on, move to new location indoors) What was the best part of coming to the Grand Canyon and doing the work and doing the river running and all? If you had to pick some aspect of it that was the best for you, what would that be?
Luck: Being able to learn about it, to impart it to the people that traverse the Grand Canyon. Study it, care about it, and try to realize what happened here. That's all we can do, is try to realize. There's no way we could know, because we were not there. We cannot be there.
Steiger: The geology, they seem to keep changing the story. I mean, just since I've been there, every few years they come up with new aspects of this, that, and the other thing. Like the desert varnish, you know that black stuff on the rocks? The latest thing they say is, that's not mineral that evaporated out of the rock, it's some kind of air-borne bacteria that lights on the rock for some reason.
Luck: Maybe yes, maybe no. It's like the hole in the ozone -this is all propaganda, right?
Steiger: Well, I don't know. You think that doesn't exist? that hole deal?
Luck: I think it's a bunch of bullshit perpetrated by a bunch of cockamamie idiots. Alright?
Steiger: You mean like the environmentalists?
Luck: Indubitably. Yes. It's like global warming: when it comes down to the real fact, the earth is cooling.
Steiger: Right now.
Luck: Right now, as you stand here. We are going back into another ice age.
Steiger: And how do you figure that?
Luck: Because bona fide scientific studies show that the earth is cooling -not these self-ordained people. See, you've got this organization called the Organization of Concerned Scientists. And to be a member of this Organization of Concerned Scientists, all you have to do is donate twenty dollars. And they have got absolutely no scientific research behind them. And yet they have the power to go out and lobby. Somehow or another they come up with the bucks to lobby, and invent these holes in the ozone, this destruction of this -this great global warming. All they're out there for is to generate panic.
Steiger: Well, I think a lot of those professionals are there just to have something to do and get money out of the deal.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: I mean, I agree. But then on the other hand, there's gotta be checks and balances. Well, like, what did you think of the dams? When they wanted to build Marble and Bridge Canyon. . . . Or Dinosaur, that whole deal. Were you aware of that? I guess you were off fighting the oil fires and all that stuff then. But did you think that was a good thing, or a bad thing?
Luck: There are pros and cons. Like Glen Canyon Dam. It definitely changed the environment, it cooled it down. It may have made it more hospitable for people to travel through it. It also established a more equal water flow. Most of the people traversing Grand Canyon at this time would not have wanted to be down there in the days of August in the thirties or forties or fifties -because the water would have been so low, the temperatures so hot, and the water temperatures would not have been such that you could adequately relieve yourself of these temperatures.
Steiger: And I guess there wasn't as much shade, either.
Luck: None, absolutely none.
Steiger: There's a cedar tree, a juniper tree down there -this is the beach I thought you were talking about at Twenty-two Mile. It must be Twenty-three Mile. It's below Indian Richard. There's a beach down there, and it was a really good camp, and then this rockslide kind of covered it up, because I remember camping on it when I first started working for Fred there in 1972. Anyway, there's a juniper tree down there, and the initials of this guy, Harry McDonald, are carved in that tree. Harry McDonald that was on the Stanton trip -or I guess the second one when Stanton came back down after aborting the first one. I don't know what got me started thinking about that -I guess just that this guy must have went up to this tree when it was. . . . I mean, there must not have been that many trees. That one must have stuck out, and so I guess he had to go carve his initials in there.
Luck: I haven't seen that.
Steiger: Well, they just found it. Part of the scientific deal, a lot of it, was definitely bullshit. You know, they got the environmental impact statement going on: How are they going to adjust the flows and all that, is what that's about. And one of the studies they had, this guy went and found all these old photos that Stanton took. He took these large format, eight-by-ten, black and white photos. Maybe they were four-by-five or something, but big negatives. And they were really good, and real in focus and all this.
Luck: Probably four-by-fives.
Steiger: He decided instead of drawing a map, he would just take these photos of the Canyon, and-- for his surveying, for the railroad idea. And he took them all, and darned if he didn't get them in focus and get them exposed right and all this stuff. And this guy dug them up -some guy who's working for the G.S. [Geological Survey] now. He found them in some basement, getting ready to be thrown out of the Smithsonian Institute. And then he started this study where he's gone back and he's re-photographed all these spots. But it turns out the photographs are real sharp and good detail. So they tried to hunt them up, and there's like two hundred of them, so they're going back to wherever they were taken from, and they try to find exactly the same spot and take a photo now, compared to what it was a hundred years ago. When they were up there doing that, some guy found these initials "H.M.D." which they figured was . . . when they were up there looking for one of these photos. They figured this had to be this guy, Harry McDonald that was on that trip. I only just found out about it a couple of. . . . Kenton told me about it. He's always kind of doing a bunch of that.
Luck: Kind of like this Gene Shoemaker. He retraced Powell's steps approximately a hundred years later. He and Peterson, I think it was, re-photographed these photo points throughout the Canyon from Green River, Wyoming, on down. Do you have a copy of that book?
Steiger: Of Shoemaker’s book? No.
Luck: It does exist. Now Peggy and I took Cal Tech on a trip. We were able to see all of these photos on a big screen -the ones that Shoemaker took and the ones that Beamon and Hillers [phonetic spelling] took, side-by-side. Now if you want, I'll lend you my book that shows all of these photos side-by-side, throughout this whole Canyon area. Would you like to look at it?
Steiger: I'd like to look at it, but I don't know if I want to borrow it, to take it out of here, yet. I might, at some point, but I don't want to do that unless I'm sure about it.
Luck: I trust you, and I know it'll get back.
Steiger: Well, I know. I guarantee you, I wouldn't want to take it out of here unless. . . . The reason I would is if I started making some kind of film deal. I keep thinking about getting a camera to re-shoot different photographs that people might have.
Luck: Don't do that. I just want you to read it, look at it, and give it back to me.
Steiger: Okay, I'll do it. Can I send it to you in the mail? Is the mail pretty good around here?
Luck: It ain't worth a fuck.
Steiger: So I gotta bring it back by hand.
Luck: Just send it priority. Now we got this postmaster up there that's a real asshole: even though the address is correct, he will send it back to sender. Going to have a blanket party for that government toad someday. Do you know what a blanket party is?
Steiger: That's where you throw a blanket over their head and beat the shit out of them?
Luck: Beat it to shreds. People around here are organizing a blanket party for him. Hell, this Gene Shoemaker is a friend of Peggy and mine.
Steiger: Pretty sharp customer. Must be, or you wouldn't be loaning this book out.
Luck: Let me tell you what Gene Shoemaker is doing right now: He's setting out there with high-powered telescopes. You are aware that July 23, there's going to be an impact of a comet on the planet Jupiter? Okay. This comet is fractured. It's had close encounters which have fractured it. Fragments will begin encountering Jupiter on probably July 23, and it will create a tremendous fireworks out there, for anybody with a telescope looking at Jupiter. And what Shoemaker is looking for is the one that will impact the Earth, which will probably be the demise of most homo sapiens -much like the dinosaurs.
Steiger: You mean he thinks that one of the fragments of this comet. . . .
Luck: No, not this one. There's another big piece of rock out there that's coming towards us, that's going to impact the Earth in about the year 2002, unless we can divert it in some way.
Steiger: And Shoemaker has figured this out?
Luck: Yes.
Steiger: He's an astronomer or something?
Luck: He was a geologist of the greatest magnitude. He was one of the ones that was sequestered -he and Lee Silver -to study the moon rocks that were brought back. And Shoemaker is the one that came up with the idea that the demise of the dinosaurs was an impact on the planet Earth by a huge piece of rock coming in. I don't know how much you know about the formation of the planet Earth.
Steiger: Well, not very darned much. I mean, I've heard about the Big Bang and all that stuff.
Luck: Okay, that puts you back to Plane . . . Negative Plus One, right? Not belittling you. This huge piece of mass is thrust out in the orbit of a star called the Sun, and it is molten, and it is attracted by the gravitational forces of this star. It begins to rotate in an elliptical orbit around this thing. There's all this debris in the area of it's path, but it is one of the major objects in the area. And it develops a gravitational force. And as it is held in this orbit around this star we call the Sun. . . . (chuckles) You're looking at me very serious!
Steiger: No, I'm just trying to comprehend it all.
Luck: This is from people like Shoemaker and Sharp. As it orbits this area, there's all this debris. And it orbits this area around here. There's all this debris in the area -little pieces of rock, big pieces of rock. And it has developed its own gravitational force. And all these pieces of rock are attracted to it, and they impact it. And the force is so great that it maintains this orbiting piece of molten substance, heated to the point that it stays melted the whole time as it goes around and around and around. Now, all of this substance coming out of here contains a chemical formula called H2O in minute amounts -water. Right? Everything coming out of the sky. . . .
Steiger: Has water in it?
Luck: Yeah, in a chemical form, a gaseous form.
Steiger: That's like the most elemental.
Luck: Yes. Okay, this "blob" keeps rotating around, and it goes around and keeps collecting these particles. And after a while, it clears a path to where there are no more, or not so much, particles impacting the Earth. Now, all of these water molecules are melting, big time, and they are in a gaseous form. And this mass continues to circulate around. And as it does, in it's orbit, there are lesser and lesser impacts creating the friction, generating this tremendous heat. It begins to cool. Then this vaporized water in the atmosphere begins to fall as rain. And it cools and cools and cools the surface of what we know as the planet Earth. It has, over these billions of years, cleared its own path of these arbitrations -impacts -and these torrential rains fall upon it, cool it, cool it, and cool it. Does that make sense to you?
Steiger: Yeah. I mean, right now, I'll believe anything you tell me!
Luck: All I know is what people like Shoermaler and Silver and Sharp tell me.
Steiger: What cracks me up about the Canyon is, you just take a little trip down through there, and it just makes you think about all that stuff. I mean, it makes everybody think about it. And you hear the Big Bang, or you hear the creationists saying, "Hey, God made it in seven days," or whatever it is.
Luck: Okay, what's happening in the Canyon is infinitesimal [compared to] what happened [in] the formation of the planet Earth. And then they talk about this "global warming" bit! Okay, this thing is out here, and it's circulating around. It eventually cools down and establishes more or less a mean. This is going to be the average temperatures, more or less, around here.
Steiger: More or less.
Luck: Yeah. You know, giving a degree or two, or ten, or whatever. No more impacts, we've cleared the path. No more big things, except every once in a while, you're going to get a big goddam thump, like probably created Iceland, which was the demise of the dinosaurs.
Steiger: Because it threw up a bunch of dust or something? Or what?
Luck: This is true.
Steiger: And it just covered up the oxygen?
Luck: It blocked out the sun, and it stopped a lot of growth. It created so much global dust that the huge beasts couldn't breathe, and so they fell down, they died. The smaller beasts survived. [B's comment: And the cockroaches shall inherit the earth.]
Steiger: And so this guy says we're looking for another hit, which is going to be the same kind of deal?
Luck: Not until 2002.
Steiger: Damn, that ain't much time!
Luck: (laughs) You're going to live to see it -I might not. (laughs)
Steiger: Well, you'd better!
Luck: Unless they can divert it, it's probably going to happen.
Steiger: Well, you don't know, I don't know either, if I am going to live to see it. I don't think you can know.
Luck: [How old are you?]
Steiger: I'm thirty-eight, but who knows how long you've got? That's the thing that strikes me. I mean, I think it's kind of a crapshoot kind of deal.
Luck: You know what perturbs me about this "global warming" bullshit? You know what happens if you have a global warming? The oceans are going to start to steam up -they're going to warm, right? It causes more rain. What cooled this sonofabitch to start with? Rain! These people are so far off the goddam. . . . I told you what it took to become a member of this Association of Concerned Scientists.
Steiger: Twenty bucks.
Luck: (derisively) Twenty bucks! And this Association of Concerned Scientists, most of those people [who sent in their] twenty bucks are dumber than a goddam post.
Steiger: That's what it takes to be a member of Grand Canyon River Guides! (laughter) Twenty bucks!
Luck: Let me go back here and get a book. (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: Were you always interested in science, or was that something that started after you started looking into this geology? I mean, what took you out there into the stars? Was it thinking about the Canyon and all that stuff? Or were you just interested in that before?
Luck: The main thing that got me interested in it was the ionosphere.
Steiger: I don't even know what that is, the ionosphere.
Luck: Okay, a teacher I had in high school, back in the late forties. . . .
Steiger: In Vernal?
Luck: Yeah. We were studying in class about radio. And he started talking about the reflectivity of the ionosphere on radio beams -how at certain times of the day you can reflect a radio beam off the ionosphere to a certain spot on the earth. You look perplexed!
Steiger: It's because I am! Is the ionosphere like space? Is that up above. . . .
Luck: It's quite a ways out.
Steiger: Well there's the atmosphere and then the stratosphere and then the ionosphere? Is that how. . . . See, I don't have that much training, I really don't. I don't have squat for an education.
Luck: I don't either. I'm dumber than a post.
Steiger: Yeah, right!
Luck: You're familiar with what they call "skip" on a C.B., citizens' band radio?
Steiger: Uh-huh.
Luck: Where you can sit here in Kanab, Utah, and talk to somebody in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Right?
Steiger: Yeah. Well, I mean, vaguely.
Luck: The only way that's feasibly possible is a straight-line deal, right?
Steiger: To talk on a C.B.?
Luck: Yeah. Okay, this is a straight-line communication. You've got the curvature of the earth that's going to stop you from doing that. You can't do it. So it has to have a reflective object, much like a satellite, which we're using now, which perpetuated this whole satellite thing.
Steiger: People accidentally were going, "Hey, we're getting this reception way over here."
Luck: Yeah. And it goes up and hits the ionosphere and reflects back down to planet Earth. God knows where, depending on the ionosphere. And that's how you can set here with a C.B. and talk to somebody in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Steiger: And this is something that they were figuring out in the forties, and mentioned it to you guys in Vernal?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: I don't know how I missed it in the sixties in Prescott, Arizona, but I did. Or I just didn't remember it.
Luck: Well maybe you didn't have the type of teachers we had! No offense meant.
Steiger: Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention.
Luck: Hey, I've got a couple of hands down at the shop that are that way. (chuckles) You know what I induce attention with? Firecrackers! When I catch them asleep on their feet.
Steiger: Do you carry some around in your pocket?
Luck: Indubitably. You sound like you were unaware of this deal on the radio.
Steiger: Yeah, I was, I have very little scientific background. I mean, I have a vague notion of the Big Bang and I know the Earth is maybe 4½ billion years old, and just kind of the rudiments of geology. But I don't know all that much about any of that stuff. And as far as where this whole thing came from, I have only the vaguest, half-formed notions about it.
Luck: I don't put myself up to be a smart old sonofabitch, either. Alright? But I have tried to listen to those who think they know. And so far, people like Gene Shoemaker and Silver and Sharp have been a real inspiration to me.
Steiger: (looking at book) Boy, some of these are beautiful pictures. This is Hillers taking these?
Luck: Hillers and Beamon. Bob Hillers -you gotta kind of take your hat off to that guy. Little bit of a cowboy who learned how to shoot a goddam camera.
Steiger: I guess!
Luck: And had the guts to stay in there.
Steiger: It looks like he had an appreciation of life. Some of this, there seem to be a bunch of these taken at a time of day that they were pretty darned interesting.
Luck: Somewhere, Shoemaker's got pictures of my boat setting in the exact photo points that _________ was. He never did send me photo copies.
Steiger: It seems like you've taken so many interesting people down there. The people in general, did you see them evolve? Well, I guess you did. You said they were adventurers at first.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And were they quite that way in the end?
Luck: Oh no -vacationers. Wanted to "do what the Joneses did," type deal.
Steiger: But it sounds like there's a bunch of interesting. . . . I mean, I guess this Shoemaker and. . . . In your mind, are there people that really, really stick out as being the most important ones you ever took down -just to you, for whatever reason?
Luck: Well, I've had a couple of three incidents. Back in the early seventies, the Anheuser Busch Corporation thought that it might be a morale builder for their sales personnel. And so they sent down some [people?] with me. And I carried them through. I met the criteria. And so later on, August Busch and company -whatever -came down, made the trip. But I had to prove that we had aerial surveillance twice a day, that would prove that they were alright and everything was okay. Well, what they didn't know, the guy that was running the aerial surveillance was my damned brother-in-law.
Steiger: And he'd just fly over?
Luck: God no! He'd come down to where you could touch the BFGs -and hiding all the [identification] numbers. Back then there were not so many government toads in the Canyon. And he always called me "Big Brother." He'd come in about eight o'clock in the morning -he knew I'd be on the water, knew about where I'd be at, because he's run "the creek" himself. He'd buzz down, show nothing but the back of the airplane. He'd say, "Everything alright, Big Brother?" "Yeah, you got it, Little Brother." (laughs) A lot of you people didn't know that kind of shit went on, right?
Steiger: Well, not exactly that. I mean, I've had a couple of wild plane rides down in there too, a couple of times, and didn't think anything of it.
Luck: What do you mean, "wild plane rides"?
Steiger: Well, I had this friend that had a Citabria. It was a high school buddy and when I started working for Fred, I was still in high school, and I ended up. . . . I quit school and bought a boat and went on this training trip and took this high school buddy of mine with me. To pay me back, he took me on a plane ride one day. He had this aerobatic airplane.
Luck: I know what a Citabria is.
Steiger: Yeah, well, he had one of them, that his old man had helped him buy. And just when we were just out of school. . . .
Luck: Who are you talking about?
Steiger: Tom Lefebvre. His old man was an airline pilot, and he flew for Leesburg a little bit, and now he's a crop duster. But he was just a born pilot, and so he took me for a ride through the Canyon, because I had taken him for one, and it scared me to death, I gotta tell ya'! I mean, just right down there, right down on the deck for a bunch of it.
Luck: (chuckles) You probably wouldn't want to ride with me, would you? (laughs)
Steiger: I think I would ride with you.
Luck: Why?
Steiger: Well, just because I'd. . . .
Luck: Because I'm afraid of dying.
Steiger: Well, I would trust you, I would -I do.
Luck: You didn't him?
Steiger: No, I did, because I got in there and went with him. Well, actually, no, I did trust him and I went with him, and he scared me to death, but here I am! I'd go with him again. I still trust him. But there's guys I've ridden with in a plane that I don't trust, and guys that I wouldn't go with again. (tape turned off and on)
Luck: Bill and Bucky Boren [phonetic spelling] walked into the warehouse down there at Fredonia. They're looking for employment. And I told you earlier that I broke four ribs in Deubendorff. I'm walking around limping and taped; Bryce Mackey is walking around on a wooden leg: And they said, "Jesus Christ, is this someplace we want to try to work?!" That type thing. But they hired on and became some of the best Grand Canyon boatmen that ever walked. He [Buck Boren] was a damned good one. I worked with Scott up on the Yampa and the Grand. He proved to be a good one there. The Boren boys were good people.
Steiger: I never knew Buck that good, but I did several trips with Bill.
Luck: You missed a real point by not running with Buck. Buck was damned sure a good one, and so was Scott.
Steiger: Scott Dunn?
Luck: No, Scott Boren.
Steiger: He was their big brother?
Luck: No, little brother.
[END OF INTERVIEW]

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Grand Canyon River Guides Oral History Collection
Jake Luck Interview
Interview number: 53.33
[BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE A]
This is the River Runners Oral History Project, and we're sitting here in Kanab, Utah, talking to Jake Luck. It's May 2, 1994.
Steiger: For starters, you were born in Vernal?
Luck: That's right.
Steiger: About when?
Luck: April 28, 1934.
Steiger: Right in the middle of the Depression!
Luck: Yeah. We were hungry back then -damned hungry. You worked three or four days to get a half-a-day's pay -my dad did. I remember it. I remember the CCCs [Civilian Conservation Corps], I remember the WPA [Works Progress Administration], and the whole bit. My dad did a lot of work on the Dinosaur National Monument. In fact, most of the rock and the powder work up there, he did.
Steiger: And that was CCC?
Luck: WPA. CCCs built roads in the more out-back country.
Steiger: And your aunt married Parley Galloway, who was Nathaniel Galloway's kid?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And Galloway did a couple of trips in 1909 or something like that?
Luck: In all probability, according to his record, he was through there before Powell was -being a prospector and a trapper, through the Grand Canyon. Wally Perry has his documents.
Steiger: You mean he was through there in the 1860s?
Luck: Quite probably. See, Wally Perry is. . . . This woman that Parley was married to, Parley Galloway and Loretta, are Wally's grandparents.
Steiger: Parley Galloway is Wally Perry's grandfather?
Luck: Wally Perry's granddad. It's true.
Steiger: I'll be damned! I didn't know that either! Well, what kind of guy was he? Did you ever meet him?
Luck: Parley Galloway died the year I was born. I never got to talk to the man. But he was a hard-drinking outdoorsman. In fact, that's what killed him -he died over here by Cedar City in the wintertime, drunk. He froze to death, as I recall.
Steiger: But his dad, Nathaniel, went down there maybe before Powell, on account of, he was trapping and stuff?
Luck: Yeah. Then he started guiding hunting trips through there.
Steiger: Through the Grand, the whole damned thing?
Luck: Yeah. Old Nate Galloway was one tough sonofabitch. My dad and he knew one another quite well. My dad said he was the best rifle shot, and had the best eye for stock, of anybody he'd ever seen, and my dad was no slouch. But _____ be out there 300-400 yards and old Nate Galloway would say, "That looks like a nice fat wether," and let that sheep down [ed: shoot it] and go over there and it'd be a nice fat wether. Just standing there.
Steiger: Now what the hell is a wether?
Luck: It's a male sheep that's been neutered.
Steiger: You mean like it's a farm animal or something?
Luck: Yeah, been castrated. (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: And his name is Joe. . . .
Luck: Collander [phonetic spelling]. Hell of a guy. You know what three-eighths of an inch looks like?
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: Okay, they needed a light-filtering device for some of this aerospace shit. He drilled 670-some odd holes in this three-eights of an inch square piece of material.
Steiger: Wow, that's. . . . Man oh man!
Luck: Yeah!
Steiger: Well, did he used to run a boat?
Luck: Yeah, for GCE [Grand Canyon Expeditions].
Steiger: That's where I've seen him.
Luck: Yeah, he's a pretty fair boat driver. Not on the magnitude that you or I or. . . .
Steiger: (laughs) Right!
Luck: One night Ron Smith and I were setting and drinking, [talking over] this oars-versus-motors bit. He said, "What a lot of people don't know, guys like you and me had to pump a hell of a lot of goddamn oak and ash before anybody would trust us with a motor." (laughs)
Steiger: Well, that is. . . . You don't know until you try to do it. I mean, what most people don't understand -especially the little rowing guys -is just that the bigger the boat, the harder it is to get it through there. And when the water is low. . . .
Luck: Well, the more weight you're dealing with, the more inertia you're dealing with.
Steiger: All that. I wanted to get back to Nathaniel Galloway. So your dad knew him?
Luck: Oh yeah.
Steiger: And then he knew Parley too, and all that.
Luck: There was an old historian up in Vernal -he was also a photographer -Leo Thorne [phonetic spelling]. He said Nate Galloway was the toughest sonofabitch he knew and had ever met. I said, "Why's that, Leo?" And this guy had quite a museum with different artifacts. He said, "Well. . . ." -everybody up in that country called him Nate -he said, "Old Nate was out prospecting on the Ute Reservation, had a little bit of a diggings there. He was sleeping down in this hole in the ground he'd dug out. These Utes came up and told him to get the hell out of there or they'd kill him." He got out of there and stayed gone a few months, I guess, according to Thorne, and he came back. And he woke up during the night and these three Utes are standing above him with knives. They told him, "We told you we'd kill you." And Nate Galloway was not a big man. He came up out of that hole and killed all three of those Utes with their own knives. That's the kind of man he was.
Steiger: Holy moley!
Luck: Pretty tough guy. And he was well respected.
Steiger: Well I wonder how come, if he did go before Powell, when Powell came down and got all this publicity, I wonder how come he didn't say, "Fuck you, I was there long ago!" He didn't care or something?
Luck: Oh, he wasn't into that kind of stuff. A lot of people aren't into publicity -including this one.
Steiger: Are you okay? Joe was talking about you hurting and stuff. You got bad stuff going on in your guts or something?
Luck: My head. Eighteen months ago, I had four teeth taken out by a dentist. There was an infection flared up, got dry socket, and he insisted it was going to be alright, fitted me with dentures. It got worse and worse and worse. He went in and dug on me. Tried to deaden it with Lidocaine, and I've never suffered such pain in my life, because it wasn't deadening. And I ended up going to a specialist. And he went in and dug out this mess. It took him an hour and fifteen minutes. In fact, old Joe drove me over, because they said I had to have somebody to drive me back. He knocked me plumb out and dug this out. Through all this happening, I suffered some nerve damage and those nerves are all inflamed.
Steiger: I might have some stuff called Anaprox in my little first aid kit.
Luck: He's got me loaded up on such heavy shit I don't dare mess with anything: Cortisone to super-high-powered antibiotics. He figured it would take two weeks for it to go away.
Steiger: I had a bad time with my wisdom teeth. Well, what did your dad do?
Luck: (chuckles) A lot of things.
Steiger: If you don't mind my asking. I just wondered.
Luck: He was a powder monkey, until he got to where he couldn't handle it any more because of the severe headaches. He helped build roads all over that country up there, in the mountains and stuff. When they were drilling for natural gas over in the Clay Basin, the man cut firewood with an axe to fire the boilers. Then back in World War II, I went with him up in the mountains and we cut mine props for the coal mines in Carbon County. An old man by the name of Leslie Murphy would get the contracts for these coal mines in Carbon County, and we cut the mine props in northern Uintah County. He started cutting those props with a hand-powered saw. He'd fell a tree with an axe, and then buck 'em up into lengths with a hand-powered saw.
Steiger: Meaning just a big old bow saw, or one of those like a two-man thing?
Luck: It was like a two-man thing, only it was short enough that one man could operate it. And I was six or seven years old. He'd have me carry -one of these props I was able to pick up and shoulder out to where they could get to them with a truck. I'd carry those sonsofbitches on my shoulders until they'd bleed. And that old man would just keep on sawing. Then he devised a power outfit along about World War II that he and I could operate. Me and that old man were cutting a thousand linear feet or better of props a day. That's a lot of damned mine props. But he figured out rollways to where a kid could handle it. Started me driving an old 1929 Chevrolet that he had rigged up as a more-or-less logging truck, when I was nine years old.
Steiger: Just get them around?
Luck: No, haul them down off the damned mountain. I don't know if you've ever been off the face of the Uintahs, but it's quite a jump. Then when I was thirteen, he had me haul them alone. When I was ten, he and I and one old cowboy that got a Forest Service motor grader operator drunk-up at lunch -that afternoon we built about seven miles of new road down off the face of that mountain.
Steiger: In one afternoon?
Luck: One afternoon. That old cowboy got up in the cab of that motor grader with the operator, showing him where he figured a good road would go. They bladed it out, and dad and I walked along behind and threw rocks off. Six or seven miles down, six or seven miles back up the face of that mountain. A long afternoon. And that road still exists! That was fifty years ago this summer.
Steiger: Damn that must have been something to have all that open country and not many people in it.
Luck: Oh yeah! The old man and I'd back up in that woods. Sometimes it'd be, oh, pushing thirty days before we'd ever see another living soul. Camped out up there, cutting timber. It was good back then. Then when I got to be about fifteen, sixteen, another one of my favorite memories was going poaching deer in an airplane. (laughter)
Steiger: In an airplane?! Who was driving that?
Luck: My instructor. He had me working around the airport there to help him out, help pay for my flying lessons. He'd say, "It's getting hungry over at my house. Be here at five o'clock in the morning." This one big grassy meadow had a long straight stretch of road in it, and there were always deer in it in the morning. We'd spot them, and he'd just glide that thing down, set it down, totally quiet. We'd knock one down, drag him over, throw him in the airplane and we were gone! Scott Dunn [phonetic spelling] got a big kick out of that. A few years ago I took him up there and showed him where all this took place.
Steiger: And how old were you then?
Luck: About fifteen.
Steiger: And you'd already decided you were going to be a pilot?
Luck: Yeah, I soloed on my sixteenth birthday.
Steiger: What kind of airplane was it?
Luck: The one we were hauling the deer out in, or the one I learned to fly?
Luck: Well, both of them.
Luck: The one we were hauling the deer out in was an old Stinson Stationwagon, 150-horse Franklin in it.
Steiger: Is that like a big old radial?
Luck: No, a six-cylinder post [engine]. The one I learned to fly in was basically a Taylor Craft, a whole 65 horses in it. You had to pay attention to get out of the Uintah Basin with 65 horses.
Steiger: Well, that's right there in the late forties?
Luck: Late forties.
Steiger: Right there about the end of World War II?
Luck: Yeah, just after the end of World War II. And the old boy also was teaching me how to mechanic.
Steiger: Your dad? or this guy that was teaching you to fly?
Luck: The old boy at the airport. By then Dad and I were out of the timber and he'd gone to work down there with Bus Hatch as a carpenter.
Steiger: And did he like that? I guess Bus Hatch was quite the. . . .
Luck: Oh, he was a character. He and Dad got along good. Bus was a damned-good carpenter.
Steiger: I read that book of Roy Webb's. Did you ever see that?
Luck: I got a copy of it.
Steiger: How'd you like that?
Luck: It was pretty true to form about Bus, yeah.
Steiger: I really liked that whole part about how they cottoned-onto Parley Galloway ______________ in jail, and how he actually talked his way out by saying he was going to take them down in the Grand Canyon, and then he took off.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: So he was kind of a rounder?
Luck: Oh, I guess. I've never heard any of my family talk bad about the man, though.
Steiger: Well, I guess the Hatches and them guys were pissed at him then. Or were they?
Luck: I don't really think Bus carried any animosity over that -not to my knowledge anyway.
Steiger: It's funny, I guess. You think about Nathaniel and it sounds kind of like he really figured out a lot of stuff about how to run a boat, that he was way ahead of any of them other guys that went down there: like Powell, or Stanton, or anybody else for that matter.
Luck: We'll put it this way: When Nate Galloway was out on these rivers and stuff like there, there wasn't a whole crew of people to pull his ass out of the fire. He had to do it all by himself, had to depend on himself entirely. You remember Dock Marston?
Steiger: I know who he was.
Luck: Marston in one of his books made the statement that Galloway was probably the most astute outdoorsman he had ever encountered.
Steiger: Wow, that's a lot coming from Marston.
Luck: Otis was not kind to most people.
Steiger: To anybody, hardly. Did you know him?
Luck: Oh yeah. He couldn't say too much good about anybody, but when he came out with that, I said, "Whew! this came out of Marston?!" But it had to be true because of all the things that Dad has told me about the guy. And guys like that old photographer up there.
Steiger: And your dad said he was the straightest shot?
Luck: Best rifle shot he'd ever seen.
Steiger: I've seen my dad set there smoking his pipe, watching young guys blaze away at a deer going up across a wash. They started at maybe 300 yards, "bangedy-bang-bang, bangedy-bang-bang." Once in a while they could get the deer onto a trot, and when they decided he was out of range, the old man would lay down his pipe, pick up his old rifle and let him down. (laughter)
Steiger: So if he said somebody was a good shot. . . .
Luck: They were goddam sure a good shot! I've seen my dad take a 25-35 at a hundred yards, standing off-hand, put round, after round, after round, into the end of a beer can.
Steiger: At a hundred yards?
Luck: Uh-huh. Standing off-hand, no rest, no nothing.
Steiger: And no scope?
Luck: No scope, open sights.
Steiger: Sounds like your dad had pretty good eyes.
Luck: Yeah, that he did, up until the last. It's a hereditary thing, Lew. Well, right now, with these glasses, I've got 20/15. It's what the doc figures I was running before I got burned too many times down here.
Steiger: Damn, I got 20/200. (laughter) I can just kind of see a rosy glow.
Luck: It's like the State of Utah went to renew my driver's license, and they said, "Are you wearing glasses?" this and that. "Yeah." They wanted to know why. I said, "Hey, when you've had vision all your life of 20/15 and all of a sudden it drops to 20/20, it scares the hell out of you! (laughter) But I'm bragging on me, so what the hell. All of my family has had real good vision.
Steiger: Well, when you were learning to fly that plane, what were you thinking of doing with that -aside from poaching deer? What made you want to do that?
Luck: I went down and took my first airplane ride. This old man broke a law big-time: there were three of us young bucks. He got us off the ground, he was flying along there straight and level, and I said, "Is that all there is to it?" He said, "What do you mean, 'is that all there is to it?'?" I said, "Can't this thing do some tricks?" (chuckles) He said, "You little smart bastard -hang on." (laughter) He made the other two sicker than hell, but I liked that feeling, and G forces, no Gs, just total weightlessness, watching the world roll around out there in front of you. The old man took a liking to me, and so he started showing me how to do this stuff. By the time he was done with me, I was way deep into basic aerobatics. Then I had to give it up because of health problems -and money. God that gets expensive!
Steiger: Yeah, if you're not doing it for a living or something. Well how did you end up going to war and all that, getting in the Service?
Luck: I volunteered for the Draft when I got out of high school. By then, you see, I was a licensed pilot, and was an eighteen-year-old kid, and I wanted to fly one of these liaison planes. And they didn't want to hear it, so they ended up putting me in a Special Forces unit, regimental combat team. Everybody in there is supposed to be super-trained. You run an eight-week cycle on basic training/boot camp/whatever, in a sixteen-week. They put me through twenty-one weeks, learning how to kill and stomp and maim, then sent me to Korea. They teach you some neat shit in those last few weeks: stuff that you can definitely use to defend yourself.
Steiger: How old were you then?
Luck: Eighteen, just turned eighteen.
Steiger: I guess it was a world of difference between going over there and then coming back.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: The way you looked at everything and stuff.
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: I don't understand any of that, I just know from people I know that ever went, it seemed like that was a huge, huge thing.
Luck: I went into that outfit, they were on Kogido [phonetic spelling] Island, trying to get their strength back. They took some pretty hard hits. In fact, they'd just rescued the first Marines off of Heartbreak Ridge.
Steiger: I don't know that much about it.
Luck: That was one nasty place. And then we went in and made a water landing, somewhere up along Korea, walked all goddam night long, and most of the next day and ended up on a hillside. See all these people around all over on the other hillside, wondering what in the hell was going on. They told us we had to dig some fox holes. I dug me one -dug that sonofabitch deep, too, boy. (chuckles) Along in the night I went to sleep. I woke up, and there's this light above me. I thought, "Oh shit, what's going on here?" I just laid there real quiet, not breathing. This is the story I started to tell you a while ago. I was staring at this light. "Aw, it ain't moving." By God, it did move. "No, it ain't moving." And your heart starts to pound. You wonder what the hell is there. You don't dare say anything. When you laid down in the bottom of that hole, you were one big brave sonofabitch. Now there's something up there shining that you don't understand, and you're about to shit your pants. I watched that thing and watched that thing. Finally after what seemed like an eternity, I started sneaking up on it. What would be your guess was glowing there?
Steiger: I don't know. You mean you crawled out of your hole and went after it?
Luck: No, it was right on the edge of the hole. It was a goddam phosphorescent root that had terrified me, glowing there in the night. (chuckles)
Steiger: You were down deep in that hole.
Luck: I was laying right in the bottom, asleep. You goddam sure get tired. Let me give you a little insight to these guys making these water landings: You see them run this landing craft up on the beach, they drop that gate, and these guys come running and charging out of there -brave men. Bullshit! What they want to do is get away from that goddam barge. Because you're standing in there, just as tight as they can pack you. You've been in there for hours, and people have to relieve themselves somewhere. You're standing in this urine and excrement and vomit, well above your ankles. These guys ain't wantin' to run out there and kill somebody, they just want to get away from that goddam stinking boat! (laughs) The thought probably never entered your mind, did it?
Steiger: No, not once.
Luck: It doesn't, most people.
Steiger: No, I don't know shit about any of that.
Luck: That was my thought, to get away from this sonofabitch.
Steiger: How long did you end up staying over there?
Luck: Thirteen months. They held me longer. (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: That looks like an old piston ring.
Luck: Way older than that. Remember the old wooden wagon wheels?
Steiger: That was the hub thing?
Luck: They had the wooden hub, and then they had these hoops that held the wooden hub together. You've probably never rode on an iron-tired wagon, have you?
Steiger: You know, I think I have. I went to this camp in Prescott, and there was this old guy named Bud Brown and he had all these mules and horses and all this stuff. I mean, it was kind of hokey, but he had them. He had a buckboard and that had rubber tires, but he had a stagecoach, and that had -I'm pretty sure that did have iron wheels. And he would drive that thing around.
Luck: Let me tell you one of the damnedest sounds you've ever heard in your life, or ever hope to hear. In the wintertime, they used to go down and cut these big blocks of ice out of the Green River or off Calder's Pond which was there in town. Then they'd load it in these iron-tired wagons. And it's anywhere from zero to forty below zero. They're pulling these iron-tired wagons loaded with that ice, running on ice. And those old iron rims put up a screech you cannot believe, rolling over that ice. God, you can hear it for two or three miles!
Steiger: That was out of Green River, Wyoming? or Green River, Utah?
Luck: The Green River there in the Uintah Basin. The river used to freeze over solid before they put in the lake at Flaming Gorge. It's a sound I'll never hear again in my life. You could hear those goddam wagons half-way across the valley.
Steiger: And what were they hauling that ice for?
Luck: They'd store it: put it in the big ice house, insulated with sawdust, so they'd have ice in the summertime. And this Calder's Pond was a big creamery company, Calder's Creamery. They made some of the best ice cream I've ever tasted in my life. Those days are past now. But they had to keep that ice -they sold ice to the public -but they had to have the ice to make any ice cream.
Steiger: So like the whole time you were growing up, you pretty much lived around Vernal there, just in that general area?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: What was it like growing up with Ted and them guys?
Luck: Ted was one wild sonofabitch. I never ran around with him that much -we just went to school together is all.
Steiger: There can't have been a very big. . . . How many kids were in a class? Fifty or something like that?
Luck: Oh no, not that many.
Steiger: How did you end up on the river? Did you get started with Ted and them?
Luck: No. Got drunk. (laughs) No, I started working for Curry probably about 1965-1966, mechanicing for him. Bryce Macky [phonetic spelling] was working for Curry at that time, just after he'd got run over with that truck and hurt.
Steiger: After Bryce had?
Luck: (passing truck -or maybe airplane? -obscures response) And I was wrenching there for a guy that ran a bunch of oil field service trucks. And Bryce come down and between he and I we built an engine and one thing and another for his wife's car and put it in it at the shop I was working at. He got disgruntled with the people that were doing the mechanic work for him, and kind of asked me if I'd moonlight and do it, and so I did. This went on for quite a while, and then I started doing driving for him. I was deathly afraid of water -you see, I don't swim. That's a strike against being a river runner, right?
Steiger: Well, I don't know, it depends.
Luck: That's why I drive a boat so goddam good! (laughter) I might not swim, but I've pulled a lot of people who envisioned themselves as super swimmers, back to the boat. I'm smart enough to wear a life jacket. But anyway, these guys got me all beered up and I made the promise, "Yeah, I'll go on a goddam one-day trip with you." ________________ with a crew was running at that time, on a one-day basis. I kind of liked it. Then that fall, as a way of saying thanks, Curry came and said, "You like to fish, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, I sure as hell do." "How would you like to catch a steelhead?" I said, "What's a steelhead?" He said, "It's a big mean rainbow trout that's been out to the ocean and come back." "That sonofabitch has got to be mean if he's been to the ocean and come back!" So he took me on a complimentary trip up on the main Salmon. I got a few pointers on how to row boats through there. The next spring he sent Bryce down with a note, where I was working -I'd changed places of employment at that time, still hanging on a wrench. The only difference was, it was more equipment and bigger equipment -an earth-moving outfit. I opened up the note and it said, "How'd you like to run a boat through Grand Canyon?" I thought, "Boy, that's my kettle of fish!" I'd seen the Grand Canyon once -I'd been down to Diamond Creek with Bryce to pick up Curry.
Steiger: And you saw it right there?
Luck: We were one of the first commercial trip river pull-outs to go out of Diamond Creek.
Steiger: Well, when you saw it, did you just see Diamond Creek, or did you guys swing by the rim or something?
Luck: We swung by the rim.
Steiger: And so that would have been 1965? That's about when that was?
Luck: In 1967. This was the spring of 1968 when Jack sent that note down. And so I ended up driving one of his vehicles down here, pulling a load of stuff. His wife and I went into Salt Lake and did a bunch of last-minute shopping. We were one of the first ones out of Vernal, ______ warehouse. Picked up some stuff, and I pulled into here in one hellacious snowstorm, into Kanab. Spent the night, and the rest of them caught up with me, the next day, late. We went through deep snow. The only one that got stuck was Jack Curry, going over the Kaibab. We had to go back and get him. I'm not belittling Jack. I ended up on a little boat he called "Baby J." He sewed j-tubes, you know, the snout bit, onto the back end of a regular twenty-two-foot tube. Put a little flat frame on it. Deadheaded to Phantom. My first squint at the river, and I was following a guy that had three trips. No way in hell you're going to do that today, right?
Steiger: So that was the first time, and you're driving a boat. And you've got people? You had paying customers on there?
Luck: No, deadheaded to Phantom.
Steiger: Oh, so you got to practice up, and then you got the paying customers at Phantom? (chuckles)
Luck: Being as I was a rookie, they gave me a little old wore-out 18-horse Johnson [motor]. You had to hold the throttle open for thirty to forty-five seconds before it would pick up on the second cylinder and start firing. Some god-awful rides! We made it. I was following a guy by the name of Lee Sutton. He was running an old Hatch-type rig with the motor hanging over the deflated back tube, ____________ flipper.
Steiger: A tail-dragger, uh-huh. Did it have a floor in it?
Luck: We had put a self-bailing floor in it. Something I'll never forget: We were supposed to pick up people at Phantom Ranch, and so we camped at Hance, just Sutton and I. We'd had a little spirits, and laid down there by the dying fire and about half dozed off. All of a sudden I realized we weren't there long, and I kind of turned over and here are these two big well-muscled hairy legs. "Jesus, what's this?! We're supposed to be way off from anybody." The guy said, "Hi," and we said "hi," and he said, "I'm Colin Fletcher."
Steiger: I'll be damned! So was he doing his walk?
Luck: No, he was doing some more stuff. It was after he'd made his big walk. So we spent the night there together, went on down and loaded up people at Phantom. Everything went fine until we got to Crystal. (laughter) This is the first time I'd seen Crystal.
Steiger: It was The Crystal, then. It was 1967.
Luck: It was The Crystal. It was 1968. And Sutton said, "Whatever you do, you have got to get to the right of that big hole, and then do whatever you can with the other one." (laughter) I got to the right of the big hole with this little old rickety boat, pretty top-heavy with ten people on it.
Steiger: Now the big hole. . . . There was two of them, and the big one was the first one?
Luck: Yeah. And then there was a real sharp dinger kind of to the left down again' the wall. Goddam I missed that top hole. I was pretty proud of myself. I attribute the missing of that top hole to some of my earlier upbringing, riding motorcycles, learning to fly airplanes, racing stock cars and stuff.
Steiger: You raced stock cars?
Luck: I raced fourteen years' worth of dirt track.
Steiger: You were driving?
Luck: Uh-huh, and a little blacktop, but mostly dirt track. Son of a bitch, I hung that goddam boat up on them rocks down there in the Rock Garden. I walked around trying to figure what the hell to do with this. Finally I decided if I got everybody over on this side of the boat, it might. . . .
Steiger: So you just moved them around and it came off?
Luck: Uh-huh. After we got down to the bottom and pulled it over to the bank and I'm standing there, my knees banging together. This one guy came up and said, "Jake, how many trips you got through here?" I said, "Just the same number you got." (laughter) He said, "Jesus Christ, this is my first one!" (laughter)
Steiger: This is a passenger?
Luck: Yeah. Yeah, we didn't have no swamps back then. [Ed: A "swamp" or "swamper" is a helper.]
Steiger: So if you were going to do it, you were going to do it.
Luck: Right. It was just Sutton and me. He had ten people and I had ten people.
Steiger: And that was the trip, that was it?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: Holy moley! And what were those people like?
Luck: They were adventurers, they were not tourists. Back then these people were. . . . You know, when the chaplin went over the goddam hill, it was probably just about right for them. (laughter) They didn't want to be namby-pambied around, no special favors, they jumped in and they would help you. It didn't matter. If you said you needed something, by God, it was there. You know, outdoorspeople -not the guy that's doing it because the Joneses next door did it.
Steiger: Yeah. Did they have much money? Or did that even enter into it very much?
Luck: It wasn't that big a deal. It was something like $175.
Steiger: So how did that trip go after you guys got off the island then?
Luck: Well, I had another severe incident at Bedrock. (chuckles)
Steiger: Went left, or something?
Luck: You might say that. They told me, "There's a big rock in the river down here. It's best if you go to the right side of it." Well up in there by Specter, I saw this big rock. And I eyeballed it and I said, "Bullshit, I don't want to go to the right side of that sonofabitch. Unt-uh! Somebody got their wires crossed." Okay, big rock is passed. Alright. Got on down there a ways, and the river broke over this crest. All of a sudden, "Jesus Christ! That's the rock they're talking about, and I'm on the left side of the river!" Well, I started bending it to the right -that wasn't getting it. I was going to hit that rock, no two ways about it, and I knew if I hit it sideways, it was all over but the crying. So I figured at the last split second I had left I squared it around and I took that bitch head-on. Folded that little piece of rubber up into a "U," slammed people around, it sprung back and went down around the left side. The water was low enough that on the left side you had these ledges to contend with. I was hung on these goddam ledges. We worked our way off them and went ka-thunk down to the bottom, and went on out. Then, by God, I paid more attention to what was going on. When I got back to Vernal, I said, "Bullshit, I don't want to do that ever again." I had more shell-shock than when I came out of Korea.
Steiger: No kidding?!
Luck: No shit!
Steiger: You mean when you said, "Don't want to do that," you meant "ever run the river again"?
Luck: Yeah. This was Easter, so I spent that summer hanging on a wrench on big old greazy goddam diesel-powered units. Spent another winter, then here come Bryce with another little note, "How'd you like to run another boat through Grand Canyon?" Well, I got over the shakes. "Goddam right!" So here we went. You've seen that poster of Curry's? This was in 1969. It said, "You haven't seen the Grand Canyon until you see it from the river."
Steiger: And that's in Crystal. That's the big hole.
Luck: I'm driving that sonofabitch.
Steiger: And that is the big hole, isn't it? That's the top hole?
Luck: Yeah. I was driving J-1. The day after they took that picture, I broke four ribs in Deubendorff.
Steiger: And that was your second trip?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: Did you hit the holes [intentionally] for pictures?
Luck: Nope, I was following a guy by the name of Roger Upwall [phonetic spelling]. He said, "Whatever you do, just stay in my tracks."
Steiger: And that's where he went?
Luck: That's where he went, and that's where I went. I knew how to miss that hole.
Steiger: Well, that was a whole 'nother boat, though. That was a different story.
Luck: Oh yeah, it was a more stable boat than what I had. If I'd have hit that hole that way, I would have flipped that little one.
Steiger: Did you know anything about the geology or history or anything?
Luck: Not at that time.
Steiger: It was just "get 'em on through"? Did you have a map then?
Luck: Yeah, we had Jones' map, a little scroll map.
Steiger: What was the routine like? What kind of kitchen was there, and the toilet, and just all that? What was the daily deal like?
Luck: Well, the toilet was, go out, dig a hole, you bury it. The kitchen was much the same as it is today. Jack Curry ran a very, very good kitchen, because he was a professional cook before he went into river running.
Steiger: He was?!
Luck: He was a professional pancake flipper for Pillsbury.
Steiger: For Pillsbury?!
Luck: You ought to watch that sonofabitch with a spatula. I picked-up on a lot of things. My crew, when I was feeding pancakes, I never fed them in front of me. I fed them behind me.
Steiger: And that's what a professional would do, huh?
Luck: Yeah. Well, this is something I learned to do with the sourdough pancakes with my dad. Until this day I can take eggs or pancakes in a skillet and never use a spatula.
Steiger: Oh, and you just throw it over your shoulder to them?
Luck: Yeah, to my crew.
Steiger: This is just for the tape: that means throwing pancakes and eggs and all that right over your shoulder?
Luck: Show. Show. Make the turkeys pay attention.
Steiger: I don't know anything about Jack Curry. Maybe I need to hear a little background on him, what he was like, and how the hell he ever got started, or any of that.
Luck: He made a trip with Hatch.
Steiger: And he was a professional pancake flipper?
Luck: More or less, yeah. And his wife, Betty Ann, was one of the most fantastic cooks you could ever imagine, and she set up a menu.
Steiger: But he took one trip and said, "I'm going to do this too"?
Luck: "I'm going to do it."
Steiger: Had he ever run a river before or anything?
Luck: Just with Hatch. (laughs)
Steiger: That was it.
Luck: Jack even spent nights in jail in Idaho, because of an outfitter's deal. He was going to start running up there and they put an injunction against him. The sheriff came and arrested him up in Stanley, Idaho. And they're hauling him off to jail, and Paul Thevenin and Art Fenstermacher [phonetic spellings] and a few of these guys were driving along behind him, and he's in the sheriff's car, waving to them out the back window! (chuckles) But he won this injunction against the State of Idaho, where he was allowed to run out there. He went through a lot of hell.
Steiger: I never even met him. What did he even look like? I guess I ought to go talk to him.
Luck: You take sixty pounds off me, and a bare haircut, dark. A lot of people have mistaken me for Jack Curry. He was a good football player in his high school days. Betty Ann was a cheerleader. That's how they met. And they were very, very kind to me -very kind.
Steiger: Was he that way to everybody? Was he a pretty good kind of guy? pretty straight shooter?
Luck: Unless they stepped on his toes. He was very generous.
Steiger: I wonder what it was that made him want to start the company and drew him to the river, after just one trip.
Luck: There's only one person that can answer that.
Steiger: Him.
Luck: Yup. Thanks to Jack and Betty Ann, I've got to see a lot of country that I never would have, met a lot of people I never would have. Just damned-good people. He thought enough of my driving ability that I taught his three oldest how to drive.
Steiger: His kids?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: Well, how did you go about figuring it out, then? What happened after your second trip, and how did you learn? I mean, did you have to figure most everything out for yourself?
Luck: People like Dave McKay, Art Gallanson [phonetic spellings]. See, McKay and I have become very, very close friends. And he knew about me running motorcycles and flying airplanes and racing automobiles and this shit. He knew that I had a very astute rate of closure vision. And he knew that I knew how to respond. And so McKay -between he and Gallanson -and I think it was mostly McKay. . . . McKay's a brilliant man, very smart. The sonofabitch has got a shoebox full of degrees. He would design these things and try to compute the inertia and everything moving you into a point, from the river current, the power of the engine, and the whole bit. And most of these back-down runs, McKay conceived in his mind. And at that time we had another guy working with us, Dr. Buck Boren [phonetic spelling].
Steiger: So McKay was working for Curry?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And when you say "designed these things," you mean McKay was the guy that figured out the runs?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: But you designed the boats, didn't you?
Luck: No, Paul Thevenin designed the boat, and then Bryce Mackey and I started adding into the original design to where it would support the load, which became heavier every year, you know.
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: But McKay would think these things out. The sonofabitch lay awake at night, worrying over stuff this way. "Okay, Jake," he'd say, "what do you think of this? You come in here, and you start shooting left. Then you bring your bow just off that gravel bar, over on the left side, and he come in from the right. You're building up a little speed, and when your bow comes by that gravel bar, you pitch that sonofabitch hard right, and you turn around and theoretically, you should be able to power off the rocks over on the left side." That's Twenty-five Mile, that's in the big hole. He said, "Can you do it?" I said, "I'll tell you in about five minutes, Dave." (laughs)
Steiger: So he hadn't tried it either?
Luck: No, no, he'd just dreamed it up.
Steiger: But he wanted you to go first?
Luck: Well, who else? I had all this damned background: severe crashes, or avoiding a severe crash. And if I made it, then Bucky would try it. In the back-down run in Twenty-five Mile, and Crystal and so on down the line. For the most part, Dave McKay dreamed it up, Bucky and I initiated it. Were you aware of that?
Steiger: No. But I know that when I started, which was way late in the game -1971, 1972 and stuff -you were famous, and McKay was. . . .
Luck: Aw, what do you mean, "famous"? We were just guys doing a job.
Steiger: But there were maybe five or six guys that you could say, "Those are the best guys doing this." Nowadays, there's a million people that know how to do it. But back then, you'd say, "Those guys know how to do it."
Luck: Well, I'm still teaching young men how to do shit (chuckles): how to cut a curve on a bow of a boat, how to make the numbers do the work for them. Is that wrong?
Steiger: No.
Luck: Well, that's where I learned from, was old people. You heard Joe say that a while ago.
Steiger: So the crew down there, is you and Dave McKay and Buck Boren and. . . .
Luck: Jim Hudson, Amil Quayle, and several others.
Steiger: Well did Curry run very many trips as a boatman?
Luck: Quite a number.
Steiger: And was he pretty good to drive a boat? If you don't want to say, it's okay.
Luck: We'll put it this way: On oars, he was poetry in motion. On a motorboat, he couldn't drive a sharp stick in a pig's ass.
Steiger: Well those are tricky motorboats to run, too, boy. Well, I don't know, because I never got to drive a Western boat.
Luck: That J-rig is the most maneuverable big boat on the river.
Steiger: A lot quicker than, say, Falany's boat? I drove one of them.
Luck: A lot quicker. See, what I'd do when I had to make a quick maneuver, I'd just move my people back, and brought that C.G. [ed: center of gravity] back closer to the engine. And then those front tubes would just set out there and float, and you could just fan that __________ one way to the other, you know. I mean, it was so goddam quick you would oversteer -you would way oversteer, it's that quick.
Steiger: I'll be darned.
Luck: Okay, no bow weight, and your C.G. is right back about fifteen feet in front of the engine, so it's quick, quick, quick. Hell, you can turn that sonofabitch on a dime and give you back change.
Steiger: Pretty good, pretty stable boat, boy.
Luck: I think Paul done good.
Steiger: Well, I wish I'd have got to drive one. How long did it take old Curry to get big? When you guys started out, was it a pretty small company? Or did it seem like he got big pretty quick?
Luck: Quite quick.
Steiger: I wonder what caused that. Was he really good at working at it and selling it?
Luck: He was good at advertisement. He at that time was putting out the best brochure, by far -wide circulation. He had good people working for him. One of his big stays was a guy by the name of Tom Menasco down in the L.A. area, a fireman, and he advertised this among firemen, police departments, Boy Scouts, and so on down the line.
Steiger: Was he a pretty serious Mormon?
Luck: Jack? Oh yeah.
Steiger: He was involved in the Church and all that?
Luck: He was on the First Council of Seventy.
Steiger: I don't know what that is.
Luck: It's pretty far up.
Steiger: So you gotta be real serious about it.
Luck: You gotta be real serious about it. He rode from Vernal to Salt Lake with Bryce Mackey and me, and he was sitting in the middle, both of us smoking. He had to make one of these Council meetings. He said, "What the hell you guys doing to me? I'm going to go in there smelling like smoke, and these people are going to pick up on me! They're going to think I'm back to smoking again!"
Steiger: Oh, because he had done it, huh?
Luck: Oh yeah. Curry smoked. In fact, he drank the same brand of whiskey I do.
Steiger: Jim Beam?
Luck: Uh-huh. How'd you know that?
Steiger: Because Denoyer told me. I already got this bottle here [Old Bushmills], or I would have got that.
Luck: You came loaded against me, didn't you?
Steiger: (laughs) No, but I just figured.
Luck: You're taking after your daddy -you're a goddam politician.
Steiger: No sir! I just figured a guy's gotta do his homework, which I don't do that much of it.
Luck: Well, I think you know me well enough now, that if a guy's in earnest with me, I'm going to be there.
Steiger: Well, I am.
Luck: If he tries to bullshit me around, his ass is grass and I'm going to be the lawnmower. There's a lot of this bullshit now you don't need to [record].
Steiger: Well, that don't matter. That's what this stuff is for. Well, ____________ I screw up every now and then. One of the things that I wanted to do was put some of this stuff in the newsletter, in the River Guides' deal, since we got this grant. For a while there, I was just doing them. I'd do people and we'd stick 'em in there. But I'm going to try to go talk to a whole bunch of people, so it'll just dribble out through the newsletter, or whatever. And just from doing it, I've already said the wrong thing -I've kind of already made some people mad, but I never will do it deliberately. (chuckles) I swear I'll do the best I can with it.
Luck: I'll tell you one of the dearest friends I ever had in my life was Georgie White.
Steiger: What was it like meeting her? How did that happen?
Luck: Oh, God, I don't really remember. I do remember when we pulled over to the Ferry with the rig and Toby Tobias would be with me. Georgie would have rubber scattered from hell to breakfast. I just pulled my truck up and stopped. Never said a word to anybody, I'd just go over to the little store and buy a case of beer. That old woman seen me going over to the store. When I got back, all of her rubber was out of the way and I had a place to rig. (chuckles) Toby looked at me, "How'd you do that?" I used to carry Georgie cold beer and ice and stuff, drop it off at her camps when she was below Lava Falls where I usually unloaded, or whatever. I'd pull into her camp. She knew I dearly loved blackberry brandy, and back then I was running two engines on that J-rig, mostly running alone. I could get it up on the step.
Steiger: You'd unload everybody at Whitmore and then double up?
Luck: Whitmore or Lava. Pump it up to where it was hard as concrete. Then I could get it up on plane [hydroplane]. I've checked it out, on five-mile stretches, I was averaging a little over twenty-three miles per hour.
Steiger: Whoa!
Luck: I'd come whistling into her camp, and she' be standing out there. There'd be four or five of these great big diesel-burning firemen, to secure my boat. Some sweet-looking little thing in a bikini standing there with a Sierra cup with dark liquid in it. I'd step down off the bow of the boat and just as I was in mid-air, that old woman would reach out and give me a gut-shot. Just bowled me over. "Georgie, goddammit, one of these days you're going to kill me!" I'd just fall forward into her arms and she'd give me a big hug. If I had somebody with me, she'd say, "Jake, you look like you need a cup of coffee," and hand me that cup of blackberry brandy. (chuckles) If somebody was with me, you know, tales do get back.
Steiger: Oh, because you weren't supposed to be drinking then?
Luck: Oh, no! Unt-uh!
Steiger: And nobody did on the trips, pretty much?
Luck: Oh yeah!
Steiger: People did?
Luck: Oh yeah.
Steiger: But it was just passengers? They could?
Luck: Yeah, they could. Yet I was expected to set out there and play the guitar for them and sing.
Steiger: But not drink.
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: I didn't realize -so you'd play guitar and sing and all that stuff?
Luck: Used to, yeah.
Steiger: Was that something you just did? You used to play before you. . . .
Luck: Oh yeah. I got with a kid in Korea that started me on the guitar. Then I went from the guitar to the banjo to the fiddle to the mandolin, trombone, piano.
Steiger: And learned how to play all them?
Luck: I've given it all up. Yeah, you wouldn't believe that of those old clubhands. Are you familiar with a mandolin?
Steiger: Not really, but I know it's little bitty.
Luck: It's got eight strings on a neck that wide, like an inch. I was down at Dooley's Bar one night and a bunch of us yokels were around there. People were starved to death for entertainment back then. There was an old cowboy out on the strip that played the fiddle real good. Several guitar pickers. I'm standing down there, leanin' agin' the bar, thumping away on this mandolin, and all of us are going -some people dancing, some people just listening, and everybody's buying us whiskey. One of the Kaibab drivers walked up, looked at me, kind of staggered a little bit and said, "You can't do that." I said, "What do you mean I can't do that?" He said, "Your fingers are too fuckin' big!" (laughter) You know, it was good times back then. Saturday night we'd keep the place open down there 'til closing time, run everybody out, and a few of us that liked to thump on stuff that way, we'd hang around there. By about three o'clock in the morning, why, we'd be down to doing the hymns (laughter), realizing it was Sunday morning. Those were the good times. You can't do that now.
Steiger: The river rats seemed like just getting down there was really getting away in those times. I mean, in the late sixties, it seemed like. I mean, I even thought it was when I started, although it wasn't, relatively, I know.
Luck: You were asking me about knowing anything about geology? You want to know who inspired me to start studying geology?
Steiger: Absolutely.
Luck: Are you familiar with the name of Dr. Corbett Thigpen?
Steiger: Nope.
Luck: Are you familiar with the movie and the book called "The Three Faces of Eve"? Joanne Woodward's first time out. She got an Academy Award. Okay, Doc Thigpen made four trips through the Canyon with me, and he was an amateur geologist. And he started asking me about geology. I didn't know shit from Kaibab limestone. And he got perturbed with me, "By God, you ought to know that, boy!" And I said, "Sir, I'm sorry." He said, "I'll be back in a couple of years, and by God, I want you to know what these formations are!" (laughter) And by God, I did.
Steiger: Now, what did he have to do with that movie?
Luck: He wrote the book. He was the shrink that treated that woman. And he was an amazing man. He was wanting to get through med school, so he was going to do it as a professional wrestler. Well, Man Mountain Dean gathered him up by his goddamn heels and wrapped his neck around a ringpost. Severe cervical damage.
Steiger: He was going to get through medical school being a professional wrestler? And it was for real then?
Luck: It was for real. It was a no bullshit thing. He decided that was not his ball of wax, and so he became a slight of hand artist. This man is good.
Steiger: On his way to being a psychiatrist?
Luck: Yeah, one of the leading psychiatrists in the nation. And I've seen this man stand there and do slight of hand in swimming trunks only. Cards laying on the ground, and telling what card they are. They showed a card, and he said, "That's your card." They'd turn it over, and he'd say, "Goddamn I must have been drinking too much!" And they'd lay it back down. Mind you, this man is standing there in swimming trunks, standing upright at all times. And they'd lay the card back down. He'd say, "Goddamn I must have been drinking too much. Marcie are you sure that's the card?" And she'd pick it up, and the second time she turned it over, it was the goddamn card he called! (chuckles) [B's comment--that's slight of foot, not slight of hand!] That kind of stuff, you know. The man was good, Lew.
Steiger: Well how long had you been doing it before you run into him?
Luck: I met him in probably 1970. (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: I sort of always have had kind of a thumbnail knowledge of it -enough to get kind of the basic gist across. You know whatever is the standard line in the time. But I never did learn the secret code language or any of that. I try, for interpretation, I've just tried to grasp the big concepts and then lay them out there in a way that's kind of accessible. But I haven't done as much homework as I should have, that's for sure. And I'm not near as good at it -I never took a course or anything -I'm not near as good at it as a bunch of these guys are.
Luck: I never took any formal training, but I did have the benefit of taking people like Bob Sharp, Gene Schoemaker, Leon Silver [phonetic spelling], down there, and they pointed out things to me to dazzle Dr. Thigpen with.
Steiger: And those guys are all geologists, obviously, huh?
Luck: Cal Tech's finest.
Steiger: Well, before that, before this Dr. Thigpen came along, did the other guys -McKay or any of those other guys running for Curry -did anybody think about that very much?
Luck: McKay thought about it, Art Gallanson thought about it. But nothing was really ever done about it, that I was aware of.
Steiger: Where, "Gee, we ought to be able to name the rocks," and all that.
Luck: Which was a requirement with Henry Falany. He used to have a more-or-less resident geologist on board. If one wasn't there, I had to stand-in for him. I got really interested in it. Were you aware that there's an nonconformity between the Supai and the Red Wall?
Steiger: No.
Luck: There's a missing member.
Steiger: (laughs) No, I didn't know that.
Luck: There is a missing member.
Steiger: I'll be damned.
Luck: It's called the Chester Formation.
Steiger: I never heard a damn thing about that. And that shows up every now and then?
Luck: The way it shows up is, you get down around Twenty-two Mile, the camp on the left. You see these big boulders of a conglomerate-type material. Okay, that is re-cemented members of the Chester Formation. And if you walk on up the canyon, right at the juncture between the Red Wall and the Supai, you can see where this stuff has been washed down through.
Steiger: And that's where?
Luck: At Twenty-two Mile.
Steiger: Is that where that rockslide was? There was a beach there for a long time, and then. . . .
Luck: Something might have happened since I was there. There was a good-sized camp there.
Steiger: Yeah, and then a rockslide kind of covered it up. It's just below Indian Dick Rapid? Below there on the left?
Luck: Just above. You can see Indian Dick from it.
Steiger: Okay.
Luck: Indian Richard. Okay, you look in among those rocks, and you'll see where this stuff has been re-cemented, and that's remnants of what was called the Chester Formation.
Steiger: So there's a little gap there in time?
Luck: Yeah, like maybe a million years.
Steiger: The first time you went. . . . You know how it kind of gets to people spiritually and all that stuff? I mean, people go down the river, especially when somebody gives you a little bit of geology, you're kind of forced to think about the origins of the whole deal and all that stuff. It kind of takes you out there on that religious train of thought. Did any of that happen your very first time? Did any of that strike you or anything? Or was it just a matter of trying to survive? You probably didn't have time to even think about that.
Luck: Oh, trying to survive and keep everybody fed and not kill anybody, or hurt anybody.
Steiger: Probably not just the first time, but the first several times.
Luck: This is true. I'll tell you what, Lew, I'm very proud of my record. I've never had to evacuate an accident victim. Of course I've only got 147 trips through Grand.
Steiger: That's a hell of a record!
Luck: I evacuated one of my crew because he was coming down with the flu, and I didn't want to spread it. That's the only. . . . I never had to evacuate an accident. I have evacuated accident victims for other people, but never my own.
Steiger: That's a hell of a deal! I've been on trips where I haven't seen that many people hurt on the water, but. . . .
Luck: It's on the bank.
Steiger: Yeah, we've sure had them fall on the trail. I mean, I probably see, an average, I'd say, of a couple of people a year, that fell somewhere or something happened to them somehow.
Luck: Back during the shigella outbreak I was running the goddam ambulance through the Lower Canyon out to Temple Bar. Load up these puking, shitting, crying people up. These people would see me coming screaming by, running those two engines, and they'd wave me in. They'd say, "Get these folks to T-Bar quick."
Steiger: Was that the early seventies? I remember Whale [phonetic spelling] and some of them guys were getting that.
Luck: Yup. And I still maintain it came out of that sewage spill that Page had over there, where the yellow streak still runs down the wall.
Steiger: I don't know, maybe that was before my time, but I remember there was a big bunch of stuff going on about all of that, but we never had too much trouble there with Fred and them. I don't know, I guess that was kind of the luck of the draw.
Luck: I never had anybody get sick. I never got sick. And I hauled all these sickies out. I'm pretty proud of that, Lew.
Steiger: Well and rightfully so. Never evacuated somebody. That's a hell of a deal. How did you. . . .
Luck: I don't swim, so I drive a boat real goddam careful.
Steiger: How do you watch out for them on the beach?
Luck: I tell them what to expect, and how to handle it. But I have had to scale walls at two o'clock in the goddam morning and set up there until it got light enough to make a descent, with somebody that was ledged up, panicked. I could go up, but I couldn't come down in the dark. You're looking at a fat old man now and saying, "How'd that sonofabitch ever climb. . . ."
Steiger: Oh, I don't say that, because I. . . .
Luck: You remember me back when I weighed about 170 pounds.
Steiger: I remember you when you were a big, tough, strong sonofabitch, and you don't look that far off from that right now, either, for that matter.
Steiger: Well, this problem that I've had is really dragging me down. I don't have the strength I used to. The last time I made a power lift was about four years ago, down there at the shop, just to show my crew, impress them: 1,127 pounds.
Steiger: Holy moley! That's like a bench press or something like that?
Luck: No, you get your back and shoulders up agin' an object, and then you're using your arms and your legs.
Steiger: That's a hell of a lot of [weight].
Luck: The most I ever lifted with my arms this way was 700. (chuckles) Just cleared the floor with it. When I was seventeen years old, on a bet, I picked up 417 pounds and carried it 100 feet.
Steiger: What was that? Was that a set of weights or something?
Luck: No, it was a piece of drill pipe. Ed Carpenter said I couldn't pick the sonofabitch up, and I said for fifty dollars I'll carry it the length of this building. I took his fifty dollars. I was seventeen. But I'm bragging about me again.
Steiger: Well, that doesn't really sound like bragging to me. That sounds like a descriptive. . . .
Luck: I was a powerful man. Very, very powerful.
Steiger: Well, and still are.
Luck: Well, not what I used to be. Like that old man that was just here. He passed sixty years old, he said, "I never knew going downhill could be this goddam tough!" (chuckles)
Steiger: Well, what gets me is how fast it all goes. I mean, last time I looked around, I was about nineteen years old. And now I'm thirty-eight! You know, I really meant to get a lot more done.
Luck: When I was thirty-eight, I was right in the prime of my river running.
Steiger: Yeah. So how old were you when you started, about? Late twenties?
Luck: No, thirty-four, thirty-five. See, we're going back a long ways, even then. Oh, earlier than that, probably early thirties.
Steiger: And you'd done all this hard work through the Depression, and then gone off to war. When you got back from the war, is that when you were doing all this racing? I mean, what happened between Korea and getting to the river?
Luck: Oh, I started racing. Then I went to work for an oil field service company. We did a lot of what they called hydro-frac-ing [phonetic spelling] where they pump fluids down a well, under a lot of pressure. When we first started it was not a lot of sand. And the theory was, you'd break the formation open, creating a fracture back to it. The process was called hydrofrac. Once you fractured the formation and started taking fluid. . . .
[BEGIN TAPE 2, SIDE A]
Okay, this is Tape 2, the GCRG River Runners Oral History Project, Lew Steiger and Jake Luck on May 2, 1994, here in Kanab, in Jake's orchard in his side yard.
Luck: The process with this was to increase the production of these wells. The theory was, it created that fracture back in the formation. Then you pump this slurry of jelled material -preferably jelled oil -back into the formation with this coarse sand. And then pump all of this out of the tubing, back into the formation, displace it out of the tubing with a crude oil. Then when you relaxed the pressure, this formation could not come back together, and it gave you a permeable slot, through which the oil could flow into the well. It was pretty high technology back then in the fifties. And then part of our bit was blow-out and firefighting.
Steiger: Firefighting for the wells? for the drilling deals? That kind of stuff?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And that was all happening in Utah, right around there?
Luck: No, back at that time I was oscillating all the way from the Texas panhandle to the Canadian border with an outfit called Halliburton.
Steiger: No shit! Was that the famous guy?
Luck: You're talking about Red Adair?
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: I met him twice. I was on two fires with him. The second one, the man went over to my boss and said, "You got enough people here to get this boy's truck to town? I'm taking him to dinner." The reason for that being, I spent three days and nights out on this blow-out fire. I mean, we had fires all over everywhere. It hit high pressure gas and it was coming up around the surface casing and anywhere you wanted to drop a match, the goddam sand would probably catch fire. We were pumping a mixture of cement and Calseal -which accelerates the setting of cement -mixing it with a nine-pound brine. In seven minutes, it would set up to where you could walk on it. Thirty-three thousand sacks of cement, 33,000 sacks of Calseal, and three days and nights, going in, pump a stage, wait four hours, and go in again. I was going in there in one of these old asbestos suits, people squirting water on me, and I was being steamed, making connections on this wellhead and breaking connections -twice every four hours. It would take me about twenty minutes to pump this mixture -mix it up and pump it in. Then I'd have to suit up, go in, break the connection to get it out of the goddam _______ before they set up.
Steiger: (whistles "whew")
Luck: Yeah, all for $1.37 an hour!
Steiger: And that's in the fifties?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: Well so the river. . . .
Luck: Where Red took me to dinner, it was down in a little place called Canadian, Texas.
Steiger: I wonder how it ever got named "Canadian." Maybe there must have been somebody down there that. . . . And that was a big fire?
Luck: It was a pretty good blaze. It wasn't that it was just one, you know -not like some I've seen where they come billowing up out of the goddam thing, and the steel derrick would melt in three to four minutes and fall to the ground. It was just a lot of little fires oozing up through. It was not that high a volume, but it was high pressure. And the guy that owned the well came out there after we had it down to just a couple of little bitty deals. This was funnier than hell to me. He's on a bawling drunk. We're setting around there roasting wieners over these last remaining little blazes, waiting for Red to say it was time for the next stage. And [the well owner] came out there and he's on a bawling drunk, and he said, "This morning they called me and they said 'Mr. Phillips, by five o'clock this morning we've spent over $20,000 of your money, and it's still going down at a horrendous rate.'" (laughter) It was about this time of night when we finally got everything put out, and Red went over and told them about it. He said, "I'm taking this boy to dinner." I was just a kid.
Steiger: How was dinner?
Luck: Good.
Steiger: He must have been something else, to figure out how to do all that stuff.
Luck: He's one smart sonofabitch. Back then, we were still using nitroglycerin to shoot off the pipe or perforate the wells, or whatever, you know, in the ___________ zone. They were just coming into the advent of the bullet gun that went down and shot these 50-calibre, armor-piercing slugs out through the casing and through the cement around the casing. It was a bit tricky to swing a jar of nitroglycerine down a well. I still remember having to tie a jar of it on No. 9 wire.
Steiger: So the idea is, if you could get a big enough bang, you could blow that sonofabitch out?
Luck: No, this was to put the well on production.
Steiger: This was just to get it going?
Luck: Yeah, you had to perforate the pipe some way. In the early years, you blew a hole in the sonofabitch, and they used nitroglycerine. And then these people came up with the idea where they could take this what they call a bullet gun, loaded with 50-calibre, armor-piercing slugs and lower it down there on a wire line to where they got the permeable zone, where they figure they were going to be able to produce. They'd lower it to that point, and then they would electronically detonate this thing and it would shoot all these holes out.
Steiger: And just whatever direction?
Luck: Oh yeah. The forerunner on this was McCullough [phonetic spelling] Tool.
Steiger: Well, what was it like getting on the river after all that kind of activity?
Luck: It was just another exciting experience. (chuckles) Alright? I've not always been a mundane old, sit-down-and-draw-it-out, weld-it-out, cut-it-up sonofabitch.
Steiger: But it sounds like the river wasn't that. . . . It was just "business as usual."
Luck: Bullshit! It was another unknown, back then. For me to negotiate a rapid that Shorty Burton died in, safely, was another hallmark in my life, because I respected Shorty. You didn't know I knew the man personally?
Steiger: No, but when you say it, it makes sense, because he was right there.
Luck: My little sister put his oldest daughter the rest of the way through high school. His oldest daughter went and lived with my youngest sister. She helped get her through school.
Steiger: Kenton told me that Shorty taught him how to bake biscuits, and got him started too -Kenton Grua.
Luck: I watched Kenton grow up. Were you aware of that?
Steiger: No, but it makes sense -and Bart Henderson, too, for that matter, probably.
Luck: This is true. Now Kenton's dad bought my ex-daddy-in-law's property. Old Tom Grua was a hell of a guy, I'll tell you. I don't know whether he's still alive or not.
Steiger: No, he isn't. I remember when he died and Kenton had to get off a trip to go to the funeral.
Luck: The last time I saw Kenton, Tom was still alive. So you see, there ain't that much to me.
Steiger: [Yeah, sure!] Did you go down there right after Shorty had died and all?
Luck: Not that long. Amil Quayle almost met the same type of fate, there at Upset. He flipped one doing exactly the same thing Shorty done.
Steiger: Was that a Hatch boat, a tail-dragger?
Luck: The same type of thing.
Steiger: What did Shorty do?
Luck: He just got hung up.
Steiger: Did he hit that thing straight and everything? I've heard that he just kind of went down there straight, and just lined her up and hit the hole straight, and it just. . . .
Luck: No, that ain't Shorty's type of run. He just missed.
Steiger: He was trying to cut it? Yeah.
Luck: You might not want to make this public. . . . (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: So Shorty Burton was forty-four and a day?
Luck: Yeah, when he died. He celebrated his forty-fourth birthday just below Deer Creek on the left, just below on that big beach.
Steiger: I wonder if he saw it coming, if he had any kind of feeling about it or any of that.
Luck: You'd have to talk to Shorty.
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: It destroyed Ruth when he died.
Steiger: Ruth was his wife?
Luck: Yeah, she's a lovely lady.
Steiger: Yeah, my sister was married to a pilot who crashed in Alaska. So you started there in 1967. Or you saw it in 1967, and then started out in 1968.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And you worked for Curry until the late seventies or something, somewhere in there?
Luck: Uh-huh. No, early seventies.
Steiger: And then for Falany.
Luck: Uh-huh. And off and on between Waterman.
Steiger: And pretty much went steady until the mid-eighties or somewhere in there, wasn't it?
Luck: No. I was pretty much tied up with Waterman welding by then.
Steiger: So it was the sixties through 'til the late seventies?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: Did you do that trip where you guys hauled the backhoes down there and all that?
Luck: I was invited on that trip, but being as I was working for Dean Waterman at the time, he elected he'd go and leave me home.
Steiger: So that was Waterman and. . . .
Luck: Bill George.
Steiger: Oh hell, I thought that was you and him.
Luck: No. No, Dean and I designed and built up the framework to carry this stuff, and Dean went. He envisions himself as a better boat driver than I. (chuckles) We've all got that ego thing to fight, right?
Steiger: Yeah. Well, you gotta think you're good.
Luck: You probably think you're better than I, right?
Steiger: No, I wouldn't say that. I think I can drive a motorboat. I mean, let me put it this way: If I can stand there, I think I can do whatever kind of run I can watch you do.
Luck: Well, I'll tell you what, ________________ a lot of ________, but when it comes to a jet boat, I ain't going to take a back seat to too many people. Dean Waterman and I built up a jet boat years ago. One of the old guys down on Lake Mead, old Mac Miller and Jess Gaddis [phonetic spelling] were with the Hamilton [phonetic spelling] bunch, around, and they learned how to make one of these 40 mph, length-of-the-boat bootlegger turns and come back. The taught me how to do this. And so when we built that jet boat and took it out on Lake Powell, Waterman said, "You want to drive this sonofabitch?" "Yeah, I'd like to Dean." I run it around there and got the feel of it a little bit. I said, "Dean, can I show you some neat shit with this boat of yours?" I had it down, feeling it. He said, "Sure." I said, "Alright, you get ahold of that goddam seat and you try to pull it out of the bottom of the floor." "What are you talking about?" I said, "Just do what I say." Hell, I got him and his kid and Scott Dunn -two of Dean's boys -we're just out for a lark ____________. Waterman looked at me like, "you silly old shit." I said, "Dean, you got a good pull up on that seat?" He didn't answer -he's deaf anyway. We're running along about 30-35 mph and I just swapped ends with that bitch and headed back the other way. Dean about half-way fell out of his seat. Everybody else was setting tight. Scott Dunn's eyes are big as saucers. We went on up, pulled into a little bit of a spit of sand out in the middle of the lake. They're out there fixing us some lunch. So I go out with Dean's oldest boy, Russell. Got him out on the lake, showed him how to do this. It's simple. All you do is, you're running a straight course down the lake, and you let off the throttle, crank it hard whichever way, stomp the goddam throttle, and start unwinding it, back to a straight course. That sonofabitch will just swap ends on you and head back the other way. Well, I watch Russell make half-a-dozen of these things out there -we're out of sight of these guys. Where we camped is back up in this little bit of a cove, and it runs in a narrow channel and right into a wall. I got off the boat, let Russell take it, and he's out of sight of us, but I can hear about what's going on. I know he's practicing these goddam quick turnarounds, length-of-himself turnarounds, in a jet boat. And sonofabitch, he must have figured he had it down pat. Here this kid comes, right up through this narrow slot, right into this wall, just balls-to-the-wall, and it looks like there's no way he's going to stop. And he snapped one of these sonofabitching turnarounds. It made my gut roll over! And he came out of there dead perfect, right back through that narrow slot. The top of Dean Waterman's head is purple -I mean his bloodpressure is. . . . And he whirled on me and said, "You sonofabitch! Don't you ever show one of my kids any more of that kind of bullshit!" This went on for years. Then Dean went to New Zealand, and he saw that everybody there was doing that. All of a sudden it became the thing to do and he learned how to do it! (laughter) You don't need to let Dean Waterman read that one either!
Steiger: Okay. Boy, that's a hell of a boat he's building. God, that thing is amazing. That's a big son of a gun. Nobody else has lifted a finger on that thing?
Luck: Hardly anybody. His cousin out of Alaska came down here and helped him with it.
Steiger: That's stubborn.
Luck: This is something you can print: What I know about boat building, Dean Waterman inspired. That's the truth.
Steiger: He's got a knack for it?
Luck: Well, evidently he saw a knack in me too, or he would not have given of his time to show me. Between he and I, I think we've come a long ways in work boat design.
Steiger: Do you want to talk about the whole -just the best boats going -I mean, the river boat, that whole thing. That whole aluminum basket thing and just the way that's evolved. That's so much better than those early boats.
Steiger: You like the way they fit together?
Luck: Oh, it's just. . . . The only mystery to me is that anybody could see one of those and not instantly realize that that's it right there. The only thing I don't understand is, how anybody could still be running any other thing, than that stuff.
Luck: You guys never had any problem pinning or unpinning boxes?
Steiger: Not really. Well you mean because they bound up and stuff?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: Well, most of my time was ARR. I guess I have seen those Ron Smith boxes bind up a little bit. But to me, just that. . . .
Luck: I mean, on GCE trips you never had. . . . (coughing spell)
Steiger: Oh, on this one, no. No, we didn't have a problem.
Luck: Everything fit together?
Steiger: Everything was totally slick.
Luck: ____________________________ argued everything was _______________.
Steiger: Oh no, it was. It's nice stuff.
Luck: What did you think of that ice box design?
Steiger: Seemed just fine to me.
Luck: Did you like the way that lid fit down in on that taper?
Steiger: All that stuff seemed real. . . .
Luck: I'm the fucking carpenter that built that.
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: I didn't just design it, I built it, because I don't have _______________ down there yet. ___________ compound angles.
Steiger: Yeah. Well, that stuff is going to just be there forever. The amazing thing about all that equipment. . . .
Luck: That lid is right fucking air-tight, too, isn't it?
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: That twelve-degree slope going in. Bragging on me again. You still got that sonofabitch [ed: the tape recorder] running?
Steiger: Yes I do.
Luck: Why?
Steiger: Well, just because I figure that's my job. I mean, for whatever that means.
Luck: I'll tell you what, Lew, each and every one of these companies come to us, and they've got their own little secretive ideas, and we try to keep it that way. And before I will impart anything that I have thought of, for somebody like GCE, to anybody else, I will call them and ask their permission. To me I think it keeps a decent rapport with these people. They come to me and say, "Hey, you know, we'd like this and do this." But I design it. Or Scott and I design it.
Steiger: What amazes me is just how far all that stuff has come. I mean, it's the space age, compared to, it seems like to me, what it was even when I started. Well, working for Fred, I mean that old stuff, there was the cotton in the middle and the wood. You know, all that stuff. Now it's nylon and aluminum. The rigs are so much more stable and so much easier. Well, just that design is so much better than that early stuff -it's just amazing. Now I don't know, because I never drove a J-rig. I guess they haven't really changed those rigs all that much, that I can tell. I guess they've made some changes.
Luck: Well, they went back and retried shit that we tried earlier, found it wouldn't work.
Steiger: Well, when you look at this whole deal -well, just at river running -there's some other kind of "big picture" things that it's probably important to touch on. One of them is just how it evolved, like how you saw it evolve between the time that you started, and then through the time you were doing it hot and heavy, to where when you kind of left off running. What happened in that span of time?
Luck: I was back on the old wooden frame bit, hanging over the back end, slickerin'. I run those. I'll never do it again.
Steiger: Was that for Hatch?
Luck: Uh-huh. No, it was for Curry.
Steiger: Oh, he started with tail-draggers?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And then Paul Thevenin said, "Why don't you put these other things. . . ."
Luck: Well, how this came about, was Carry was able to buy a bunch of these surplus snout boats -you know, the old pontoons -just kind of an off-the-wall thing. I've drove trucks over those sonsofbitches over in Korea.
Steiger: You were using them?
Luck: Oh yeah! There's a place over there called "the Murderer's Mile." We had to drop down in and run across this goddam flotation bridge. Quite a deal. Thevenin came up with the idea of cutting out a section here, and sewing it together there with a baseball stitch, and then running it ______________ (comment obscured by siren, tape turned off and on, aside about siren not transcribed).
Steiger: Well, just the way that trips changed and stuff. . . . I mean, when I think about evolution, there's the equipment, and then the kind of people that were coming, and then just what the "show" was. To me, I don't know why, but it seems like it's important to ask about how all that stuff evolved, and then the government. It seems important to touch on all those things, if for no other reason than to, I don't know, maybe do it better in the future, or keep it from getting any worse: hang onto what's the best of what the Canyon is. Or the best of what that experience is for those people that go down there.
Luck: Well, the thing that kind of irritates me about this, back when I was raised up, a man made a camp, that was his domain, that was his castle. And if anybody wanted to come in and visit, they asked permission. They definitely asked permission, because for that night, by God, that's his home, that's his domicile. That is his private piece of property.
Steiger: This is on the river, or this is anywhere?
Luck: Anywhere, anywhere. You did not ride into an old cowboy's camp and start demanding this or that or whatever, or you're going to die, right now, no questions asked.
Steiger: And that's the way it was.
Luck: That's the way it was. I can remember those times. It didn't matter [if] you were a Forest Service official, a game warden, or whatever -they rode up on that man's camp, they asked permission to light [ed: get down off their horse]. And if it was denied, they'd better, by God, be hoofing it and come back with a warrant. You follow what I'm saying?
Steiger: Yeah, I do, I think. And that wasn't just the Mormons, that was everybody. That was just the way it was.
Luck: That was the U.S. Forest Service, Utah Fish and Game. . . .
Steiger: If somebody was out, camped, that was their territory?
Luck: This is true. It's the same as their home. You did not just come in, jump off the goddam boat and start riffling through their belongings, unless you had reason.
Steiger: Yeah. Well, you know, I guess the hard part. . . .
Luck: Hitler was the one who perpetuated this thing. Now you talk about socialism, Naziism, communism -whatever -that's what we're going into. Our government is trying to shove this down our throats, show us that they are the awe-instilling power. We don't need this.
Steiger: Why is it that that's happening?
Luck: Because too many people sat around on their fat asses and let it happen. Too many people are unwilling to fight. Am I wrong?
Steiger: Well, I don't know. I just saw this movie about what happened over there in Germany, and you look at all these Jews getting herded around and stuff, and I know that it is like you say. What happens in that deal is, first they take all their stuff away from these people. . . . (tape turned off and on) Well, I just wonder, the hard part is that there's government intervention, and nine times out of ten it isn't worth a shit and it makes things worse than it was before. But I look at the Canyon: the thing that gets to me is, you look at that whole set-up and somehow there needed to be some kind of control over it. This whole country, we've moved from this time when your camp was where nobody could come in, to. . . . I mean, I don't know how you hang onto that.
Luck: Nobody could come in unless they asked to come in. Permission was never . . .
Steiger: . . . particularly denied.
Luck: Yes.
Steiger: So even if it was crowded in the Canyon, if you behaved a certain way, then you wouldn't need this other stuff.
Luck: As long as they don't act like a bunch of S.S. troops, this is fine.
Steiger: Well, we got that now to the nth degree. I mean, the whole thing is pretty skewed.
Luck: Well, these -as we call them here -"toads" are in quest of power. They've got a power mania, and they've long since [forgotten] that they are government servants and that they should be civil. Maybe you agree with me, maybe you don't, but that's my feeling. They are my employee.
Steiger: Well, I don't think they have realized, that's the thing. I think they forget that.
Luck: I am paying their goddam wages, and they are my servant, and they will be treated as "folks" if they act like folks. But when they come in trying to lord a power over me, then I become irate. And I cannot condone this. No man is better than I, no matter what color uniform, or what little badge he's wearing, he is not better than me, and I am innocent until he proves me guilty. [In his eyes] I am guilty until I prove myself innocent, which is the way they're working it now. I have to prove myself innocent. It used to be they had to prove me guilty. I run a clean camp, very clean camp. I've never had anybody evacuated under any emergency. Doing my cooking, doing my food handling, doing my boat driving, all my general management of the river: I've never had anybody injured on a hike, never had anybody injured on the boat, never had anybody come down with any illness of food mispreparation. Why these people feel they can rain down on me, I do not know.
Steiger: Was there a time when the Park was pretty reasonable? like when you started?
Luck: Indubitably. Back then they conducted themselves as civil persons. I can remember back when for forty dollars a head we were taking Park Service personnel through the Canyon.
Steiger: _______________________.
Luck: Yes. To teach them how to run a river trip, teach them how to get through the Canyon safely, to teach them how to prepare a proper diet. The government paid Curry forty dollars a head for us to train these people.
Steiger: Looking back on it, if you had to name just the best of your time down there, what was it? How would you describe that?
Luck: Oh, it was back before they started to crowd everybody through a little bitty window.
Steiger: Like back there in 1968?
Luck: Back when we ran from March through November, when we could go through the Canyon and not see that many folks. People were more disbursed because they weren't jammed through a little bitty window. Back when you'd traverse the whole Canyon without seeing another person, probably. Back when the person that you loved dearly would drop into the Canyon in an airplane, bounce a roll of toilet paper off your boat, then get on the radio and say, "Are you alright, Jake?"
Steiger: That's Leesburg? [phonetic spelling]
Luck: I ain't mentioning any names. I have a few friends that would do that.
Steiger: Yeah, I can think of another one too. I asked Michael, "God, what do I ask about?" and one of the things he said was, "Ask about getting hung up and spending the night on the rock island." I don't know if you want to talk about that.
Luck: Oh, this is true.
Steiger: He just said that was a hell of a story.
Luck: I did that, yeah. I was driving one of Curry's rigs, called the "Super J," forty-five feet long.
Steiger: That was just a design wrinkle?
Luck: Well, it was some of that, and a whole lot of pilot error.
Steiger: That's an awful long boat.
Luck: Yeah. It's all Henry Falany's fault, every bit of it.
Steiger: (chuckles) He just said, "Make the boat bigger"?
Luck: No, this thing had a stretched-out, added-onto, cotton doughnut deal. Then it had the snout tubes on the outside. It really widened out, had the typical J rig frames on it. I had met Henry up at, oh, I guess Phantom Ranch. I said, "Where do you want to camp, Henry?" He said "Oh, I'm going to go on below Crystal." And I said, "Okay, I'm going to camp at the head of Granite then." He took off, and goddam, I'm running kind of late at night. I start to pull in at the head of Granite, and there's Falany. I said, "You sonofabitch! Now where the hell am I going to camp?" So I knew Crystal was facing me, and I went on down, and like I told you before, we had come up with this back-down run and turn around. So I knew what Crystal was going to look like. So I come in at the head of it, and I pitched it to the right, and I'm gliding down along there with it pointed to the right bank, waiting on the throttle in case I needed to give it more. And all of a sudden I realized that sonofabitch was too long, and I had given it too much, and the bow of the boat grabbed a rock and spun me backwards, a long time before I wanted to be spun backwards. And I can't recover from it. It's spinning be down, out and back. I end up jammed up on a big boulder, just off the right bank.
Steiger: Oh, not the rock island?
Luck: Oh no. Oh no, right beside the big hole at the top. Right directly across it.
Steiger: I've hung up there. I hung up there the first time I ever ran that thing -right directly across from the hole, a big, kind of red, pointy round rock? (laughs)
Luck: You got that sonofabitch!
Steiger: Yeah, I nailed that thing the first run.
Luck: Okay, I'm hung-up on this thing. Well, I got a Canook [ed: Canadian] with me, a geologist by the name of Carl Narbig [phonetic spelling], tremendous man. We jump out and try to push this sonofabitch off this rock. Well the current catches him -he's upstream from me -and it starts pushing him down. And both of us are up toward the bow of the boat, and his body slams into mine, and I'm ahold of the lifeline alongside the boat, and [the impact] pulls me free of this life line -not free, but it slid from my grip. My hands slide down agin' the "D" ring, and the pain becomes so excruciating that I can't handle it any more, so I turn loose and grab for another grip, hoping it'll be less on the next one. We slide down agin' it, and the same story -I can't stand the pain in my hand with both of our bodies in that current. So I grabbed for a lower grip -we got forty-five feet here to play with -and it pushes me on down to the next one -the same story, I have to release from that one. And I grabbed the last one, and I realized, you got twenty-four people on board this fucking boat, and they're dependent upon you and Carl. So I just bit the goddam boat and hung on. By then there were enough of these people -they were from Litton Industries out of California, and several of them were return trippers, they knew the score -and they were there by that time. It seems like an eternity to you, hanging on the side of this sonofabitch, but in all probability it was just a matter of seconds. All of a sudden these people were there. I'm on the last "D" ring, I got nowhere to go but on down the creek, and then try to fight my way back and figure another way back to the boat. These faces appeared, arms started coming over the side of the boat, they snagged Carl out, then they got me. I said, "Okay, is everybody alright?" They said, "Yeah." So everybody poked fun at me for carrying a Coleman stove. So I lit up the Coleman stove, Carl and I barbecued up some chicken.
Steiger: Right there on the boat?
Luck: Right there on the boat.
Steiger: Too far to get to shore?
Luck: Oh yeah! Shit, there was a lot of fast water running by. You sure you want to hear all this bullshit?
Steiger: Yeah, if you don't mind. I mean, to me, this is absolutely. . . .
Luck: It was an incident. Prior to this, "Look" magazine was running an Indians' fashions article, and they had looked all over the area for a tall Navajo, Piute, whatever, to stand there with this good-looking French model they had, to do these Indian fashions for "Look" magazine.
Steiger: Indian fashions in the Grand Canyon?!
Luck: Curry had them. He was a day ahead of me, or two days. The gal that was running this, was a bit despaired over what they'd been able to find in the way of Indian models. [She] looked at me, being kind of dark, and said, "He'll do." Curry said, "That's good. He'll be a couple of days behind us, he'll catch us around Havasu." Alright. Well, these are return people from Litton Industries, and I've got a little lady on board that I was kind of partial to -she'd been with me before. Anyway, I came into that goddam rapid, I'm sliding down, that bow snags this rock and spun me backwards, put me on these big ones and Carl and I do this sliding-down-the-goddam-rope thing, get up on there, and we fix them all dinner. And somebody said -this was back before the days of porta-potties, "What do we do about toilet facilities?" I said, "The same as on the bank: women upstream, men downstream." Alright. I fix them up dinner, everybody got fed and they got bedded down. I'm rambling, ain't I?
Steiger: No, you're doing good, honest. Don't worry about it in the least.
Luck: I'd told them before this about how the rapid had been formed, about the flash flood. Well, along about midnight, one itty bitty cloud comes up over the top, and a few drops of rain hit the boat. And this one guy on there -he's a real paranoid, named Frank -comes back and says, "Jake, it's raining! I don't want to be washed down out of here." I said, "I don't either, Frank." This is right at midnight. The only place for me to try to get any "Zs" is down in the motor well at the back end of this thing. The lovely lady decided she would accompany that space with me. We're back in there trying to catch some sleep. We're cramped-up in this three-foot by three-foot cubicle. I'm hurting, and she's hurting -we're cramped. It's a bad scene, alright? but we are hung-up there, big time. Well, just as a point of jest: One of these guys comes back there to relieve himself off the back end of the boat, which is downstream. He's standing back there and tinkles -totally unaware of us being there. Just as he turns to leave, this little blonde-headed thing says, "Don't walk off and leave anything running." God, he almost jumped off the boat! You realize these are pretty deep, dark secrets. Well, when it started sprinkling, why this guy, Frank, comes back down there. He's all in a panic, "I don't want to be washed out of here!" I said, "Goddam, Frank, I don't either. But I'll tell you what, it's pretty evident you ain't going to sleep, and I've got to have mine, so why don't you come back and give me a report every hour, on the hour." "Okay." So the little bit of a sprinkle passes by, and just one hour, right to the quiver and a tick, he's back there, "Jake, Jake, the water's going down. The boat's starting to. . . ." "That's exactly what I want, Frank. See you at two o'clock." (sigh) Well, it's one-thirty, he's back there, "Jake, Jake! God, the water's really going down. This boat's really getting twisted." "That's good, Frank. I like that a lot." This went on down to where it was every five minutes.
[END TAPE 2, SIDE A; BEGIN SIDE B]
Steiger: . . . dirty job, but somebody's got to do it. (glug, glug, glug of the Bushmills pouring into glasses)
Luck: Where the hell were we? Along about four o'clock in the morning, just barely breaking daylight, I got everybody up, and I set my kitchen out on the goddam rocks and started cooking breakfast, and the water started coming up. I had Narbig have all the people unload all the heavy shit that they could off the bow of the boat, and I pushed it out. And then I moved everything so the current would catch it and spin it. Back then we had to carry oars, these fifteen-foot jobbers. They were using those as pry bars, prying it over these boulders. Christ Almighty, you could nearly walk underneath the boat over the top of some of those rocks. I mean, it was a severe drop in the water. The rock that formed the hole at the top of Crystal was exposed.
Steiger: So it probably went from 15,000 cfs down to 3,000? It was that kind of deal?
Luck: Probably 1,500 cfs.
Steiger: Fifteen thousand to fifteen hundred?
Luck: That would be my guess, yeah -a severe drop. They're prying away on this boat. They got this splashboard, two-foot by eight-foot piece of plywood that we use as a table, on the bank -and a whole manner of shit. And they're prying this thing, and horsing it over, moving the heavy shit forward, trying to move the back end a little. The water started coming up and started washing the kitchen away, so we put all this shit up on the boat, went ahead with breakfast, and had one of the guys tie a rope to the bow, up to a rock up here, where when it tightened up, it would swing it to where I wanted it. And I got these people all fed: I cooked them up bacon and blueberry pancakes on my Coleman stove. I'm just finishing up eating, and I felt the boat shift. I had given this guy my knife -which I always take pride in it being pretty sharp. I told him, "When I call for it, just cut that goddam rope." I'm downing my last bite of pancakes, I felt the boat shift again, and he said, "Jake, this sonofabitch is starting to tear the boat apart." And I said, "Cut the goddam line." He hit the line and it exploded like a shot. Well, we were minus a piece of plywood and a few articles, but it didn't matter. We went on down. That goddam Johnson [ed: motor] wouldn't start!
Steiger: Hoo boy!
Luck: So I changed it, put another one on, and got it running just before we hit Tuna Creek. Got through it, went on down to Havasu, caught up with Curry, and they started laying on me what they wanted me to do about posing with this gal. They wanted me to stand up there on these hot rocks, barefooted, nothing but a breechcloth on. It's 130o ______________ you know. I said, "I don't need no part of this shit!" And Curry was over asking Carl, "How'd you do in Crystal?" "Oh," Carl says, "it was rather unique." Curry said, "Jake must have done his back-down run." Carl said, "You might say that." (laughter) But it was due to that extra length, why I snagged that rock. I just did not see it coming up. We visited people at Havasu and went on down the creek. Missed my debut in "Look" magazine, right?
Steiger: Oh well. Were you running in 1983?
Luck: Yeah!
Steiger: So you got to see all that high water and all that shit?
Luck: Got to see how Crystal washed away the hell upstream about another hundred yards -about a million cubic yards of earth moved.
Steiger: Were you right down there through all that shit? Did you see it at 70,000 cfs or after it went up there to 90,000 cfs? Or somewhere in between?
Luck: I didn't get there until it receded to 45,000 cfs.
Steiger: That was a hell of a deal. I kind of miss the old one. I mean, the new has sure got its points, but you don't realize how dynamic it all is at first, I don't think. I sure didn't. I mean, these places: Crystal and Havasu and a lot of these places change, and it seems like it always used to catch me by surprise.
Luck: That gives you an idea how all that Canyon happened, right?
Steiger: Yeah.
Luck: When you start thinking about all the sediment that the Colorado River has carried. . . . What was it? 1937? the gauging station there at Phantom Ranch estimated it was carrying 27,000 cubic yards of earth every twenty-four hours.
Steiger: (whistles "whew")
Luck: That's a lot of abrasiveness.
Steiger: A cubic yard is a lot of dirt, isn't it? In 1968, what did the beaches look like? and the driftwood and all that? Do you remember that? Do you remember it changing a lot?
Luck: Oh, back then, there was enough driftwood. We cooked primarily on mesquite. There was enough dead wood and enough driftwood to where we could run our cooking fire on those.
Steiger: So you'd actually go and just gather the good wood?
Luck: Uh-huh.
Steiger: And then did you see the beaches get smaller? Or did you even notice much of that?
Luck: I saw them begin to decline, yeah -to a point, nothing spectacular, nothing earthshaking. But then I saw the decline of firewood, and I got tired of going out and trying to hustle it. So I built the propane stove type thing.
Steiger: Those blasters?
Luck: No, it was the rectangular thing. And I cooked on those for a couple of years, carrying my own propane.
Steiger: And that was just something you'd decided? "To hell with it," that's what you were going to do?
Luck: Yeah, because I'm a lazy sonofabitch, alright? I got tired of gathering firewood, got tired of asking my people to gather firewood. Became tired of not having enough firewood to cook a meal with. And this "blaster" thing you're talking about (chuckles), that was an evolution thing. What I primarily invented that thing for was a garbage disposal. See, it was a lot taller. I fluted it so it would circulate around. Then I put the propane underneath this three-foot-high tall, sixteen-inch tube. And all garbage went in that sonofabitch -wet or dry.
Steiger: Wow, and it'd do it, it'd cook it up.
Luck: And instead of me crossing the lake with all these big bagfulls of garbage, and a half-mile long string of flies following me, I had a couple little bags of ashes. That's the way my daddy taught me: the cleaner you can leave your camp, the better it's going to be for the next guy.
Steiger: And he taught you that back in the thirties?
Luck: Back in the forties.
Steiger: People looked at it like that.
Luck: Yeah, he did. All the mountain people did. Leave a clean camp. And I would come off of the river with just a couple of little bags of ashes. I mean pork chop bones, chicken bones, steak bones, were powder. Once I initiated the fire, got it going big-time, with the way I had it fluted, it would burn by itself. And people said, "Well, God, what about these folks standing around the stench of this burning garbage?" I said, "A fire is a fire. People are attracted to a fire. If they don't like the smell, they'll move to the other side of the goddam fire." (laughs) Right?
Steiger: Yeah, that's right, and that's true.
Luck: Once I got it really going, it would melt it down. Cantaloupe rinds, everything that way.
Steiger: There was always a propane feed in there?
Luck: No, once you really got it established. . . .
Steiger: It'd just suck air?
Luck: You could stop the propane.
Steiger: Had a little grate in the middle of it or something?
Luck: Yeah. And this thing would melt an aluminum beer can down in ten seconds.
Steiger: (whistles "whew") (tape shut off and on, move to new location indoors) What was the best part of coming to the Grand Canyon and doing the work and doing the river running and all? If you had to pick some aspect of it that was the best for you, what would that be?
Luck: Being able to learn about it, to impart it to the people that traverse the Grand Canyon. Study it, care about it, and try to realize what happened here. That's all we can do, is try to realize. There's no way we could know, because we were not there. We cannot be there.
Steiger: The geology, they seem to keep changing the story. I mean, just since I've been there, every few years they come up with new aspects of this, that, and the other thing. Like the desert varnish, you know that black stuff on the rocks? The latest thing they say is, that's not mineral that evaporated out of the rock, it's some kind of air-borne bacteria that lights on the rock for some reason.
Luck: Maybe yes, maybe no. It's like the hole in the ozone -this is all propaganda, right?
Steiger: Well, I don't know. You think that doesn't exist? that hole deal?
Luck: I think it's a bunch of bullshit perpetrated by a bunch of cockamamie idiots. Alright?
Steiger: You mean like the environmentalists?
Luck: Indubitably. Yes. It's like global warming: when it comes down to the real fact, the earth is cooling.
Steiger: Right now.
Luck: Right now, as you stand here. We are going back into another ice age.
Steiger: And how do you figure that?
Luck: Because bona fide scientific studies show that the earth is cooling -not these self-ordained people. See, you've got this organization called the Organization of Concerned Scientists. And to be a member of this Organization of Concerned Scientists, all you have to do is donate twenty dollars. And they have got absolutely no scientific research behind them. And yet they have the power to go out and lobby. Somehow or another they come up with the bucks to lobby, and invent these holes in the ozone, this destruction of this -this great global warming. All they're out there for is to generate panic.
Steiger: Well, I think a lot of those professionals are there just to have something to do and get money out of the deal.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: I mean, I agree. But then on the other hand, there's gotta be checks and balances. Well, like, what did you think of the dams? When they wanted to build Marble and Bridge Canyon. . . . Or Dinosaur, that whole deal. Were you aware of that? I guess you were off fighting the oil fires and all that stuff then. But did you think that was a good thing, or a bad thing?
Luck: There are pros and cons. Like Glen Canyon Dam. It definitely changed the environment, it cooled it down. It may have made it more hospitable for people to travel through it. It also established a more equal water flow. Most of the people traversing Grand Canyon at this time would not have wanted to be down there in the days of August in the thirties or forties or fifties -because the water would have been so low, the temperatures so hot, and the water temperatures would not have been such that you could adequately relieve yourself of these temperatures.
Steiger: And I guess there wasn't as much shade, either.
Luck: None, absolutely none.
Steiger: There's a cedar tree, a juniper tree down there -this is the beach I thought you were talking about at Twenty-two Mile. It must be Twenty-three Mile. It's below Indian Richard. There's a beach down there, and it was a really good camp, and then this rockslide kind of covered it up, because I remember camping on it when I first started working for Fred there in 1972. Anyway, there's a juniper tree down there, and the initials of this guy, Harry McDonald, are carved in that tree. Harry McDonald that was on the Stanton trip -or I guess the second one when Stanton came back down after aborting the first one. I don't know what got me started thinking about that -I guess just that this guy must have went up to this tree when it was. . . . I mean, there must not have been that many trees. That one must have stuck out, and so I guess he had to go carve his initials in there.
Luck: I haven't seen that.
Steiger: Well, they just found it. Part of the scientific deal, a lot of it, was definitely bullshit. You know, they got the environmental impact statement going on: How are they going to adjust the flows and all that, is what that's about. And one of the studies they had, this guy went and found all these old photos that Stanton took. He took these large format, eight-by-ten, black and white photos. Maybe they were four-by-five or something, but big negatives. And they were really good, and real in focus and all this.
Luck: Probably four-by-fives.
Steiger: He decided instead of drawing a map, he would just take these photos of the Canyon, and-- for his surveying, for the railroad idea. And he took them all, and darned if he didn't get them in focus and get them exposed right and all this stuff. And this guy dug them up -some guy who's working for the G.S. [Geological Survey] now. He found them in some basement, getting ready to be thrown out of the Smithsonian Institute. And then he started this study where he's gone back and he's re-photographed all these spots. But it turns out the photographs are real sharp and good detail. So they tried to hunt them up, and there's like two hundred of them, so they're going back to wherever they were taken from, and they try to find exactly the same spot and take a photo now, compared to what it was a hundred years ago. When they were up there doing that, some guy found these initials "H.M.D." which they figured was . . . when they were up there looking for one of these photos. They figured this had to be this guy, Harry McDonald that was on that trip. I only just found out about it a couple of. . . . Kenton told me about it. He's always kind of doing a bunch of that.
Luck: Kind of like this Gene Shoemaker. He retraced Powell's steps approximately a hundred years later. He and Peterson, I think it was, re-photographed these photo points throughout the Canyon from Green River, Wyoming, on down. Do you have a copy of that book?
Steiger: Of Shoemaker’s book? No.
Luck: It does exist. Now Peggy and I took Cal Tech on a trip. We were able to see all of these photos on a big screen -the ones that Shoemaker took and the ones that Beamon and Hillers [phonetic spelling] took, side-by-side. Now if you want, I'll lend you my book that shows all of these photos side-by-side, throughout this whole Canyon area. Would you like to look at it?
Steiger: I'd like to look at it, but I don't know if I want to borrow it, to take it out of here, yet. I might, at some point, but I don't want to do that unless I'm sure about it.
Luck: I trust you, and I know it'll get back.
Steiger: Well, I know. I guarantee you, I wouldn't want to take it out of here unless. . . . The reason I would is if I started making some kind of film deal. I keep thinking about getting a camera to re-shoot different photographs that people might have.
Luck: Don't do that. I just want you to read it, look at it, and give it back to me.
Steiger: Okay, I'll do it. Can I send it to you in the mail? Is the mail pretty good around here?
Luck: It ain't worth a fuck.
Steiger: So I gotta bring it back by hand.
Luck: Just send it priority. Now we got this postmaster up there that's a real asshole: even though the address is correct, he will send it back to sender. Going to have a blanket party for that government toad someday. Do you know what a blanket party is?
Steiger: That's where you throw a blanket over their head and beat the shit out of them?
Luck: Beat it to shreds. People around here are organizing a blanket party for him. Hell, this Gene Shoemaker is a friend of Peggy and mine.
Steiger: Pretty sharp customer. Must be, or you wouldn't be loaning this book out.
Luck: Let me tell you what Gene Shoemaker is doing right now: He's setting out there with high-powered telescopes. You are aware that July 23, there's going to be an impact of a comet on the planet Jupiter? Okay. This comet is fractured. It's had close encounters which have fractured it. Fragments will begin encountering Jupiter on probably July 23, and it will create a tremendous fireworks out there, for anybody with a telescope looking at Jupiter. And what Shoemaker is looking for is the one that will impact the Earth, which will probably be the demise of most homo sapiens -much like the dinosaurs.
Steiger: You mean he thinks that one of the fragments of this comet. . . .
Luck: No, not this one. There's another big piece of rock out there that's coming towards us, that's going to impact the Earth in about the year 2002, unless we can divert it in some way.
Steiger: And Shoemaker has figured this out?
Luck: Yes.
Steiger: He's an astronomer or something?
Luck: He was a geologist of the greatest magnitude. He was one of the ones that was sequestered -he and Lee Silver -to study the moon rocks that were brought back. And Shoemaker is the one that came up with the idea that the demise of the dinosaurs was an impact on the planet Earth by a huge piece of rock coming in. I don't know how much you know about the formation of the planet Earth.
Steiger: Well, not very darned much. I mean, I've heard about the Big Bang and all that stuff.
Luck: Okay, that puts you back to Plane . . . Negative Plus One, right? Not belittling you. This huge piece of mass is thrust out in the orbit of a star called the Sun, and it is molten, and it is attracted by the gravitational forces of this star. It begins to rotate in an elliptical orbit around this thing. There's all this debris in the area of it's path, but it is one of the major objects in the area. And it develops a gravitational force. And as it is held in this orbit around this star we call the Sun. . . . (chuckles) You're looking at me very serious!
Steiger: No, I'm just trying to comprehend it all.
Luck: This is from people like Shoemaker and Sharp. As it orbits this area, there's all this debris. And it orbits this area around here. There's all this debris in the area -little pieces of rock, big pieces of rock. And it has developed its own gravitational force. And all these pieces of rock are attracted to it, and they impact it. And the force is so great that it maintains this orbiting piece of molten substance, heated to the point that it stays melted the whole time as it goes around and around and around. Now, all of this substance coming out of here contains a chemical formula called H2O in minute amounts -water. Right? Everything coming out of the sky. . . .
Steiger: Has water in it?
Luck: Yeah, in a chemical form, a gaseous form.
Steiger: That's like the most elemental.
Luck: Yes. Okay, this "blob" keeps rotating around, and it goes around and keeps collecting these particles. And after a while, it clears a path to where there are no more, or not so much, particles impacting the Earth. Now, all of these water molecules are melting, big time, and they are in a gaseous form. And this mass continues to circulate around. And as it does, in it's orbit, there are lesser and lesser impacts creating the friction, generating this tremendous heat. It begins to cool. Then this vaporized water in the atmosphere begins to fall as rain. And it cools and cools and cools the surface of what we know as the planet Earth. It has, over these billions of years, cleared its own path of these arbitrations -impacts -and these torrential rains fall upon it, cool it, cool it, and cool it. Does that make sense to you?
Steiger: Yeah. I mean, right now, I'll believe anything you tell me!
Luck: All I know is what people like Shoermaler and Silver and Sharp tell me.
Steiger: What cracks me up about the Canyon is, you just take a little trip down through there, and it just makes you think about all that stuff. I mean, it makes everybody think about it. And you hear the Big Bang, or you hear the creationists saying, "Hey, God made it in seven days," or whatever it is.
Luck: Okay, what's happening in the Canyon is infinitesimal [compared to] what happened [in] the formation of the planet Earth. And then they talk about this "global warming" bit! Okay, this thing is out here, and it's circulating around. It eventually cools down and establishes more or less a mean. This is going to be the average temperatures, more or less, around here.
Steiger: More or less.
Luck: Yeah. You know, giving a degree or two, or ten, or whatever. No more impacts, we've cleared the path. No more big things, except every once in a while, you're going to get a big goddam thump, like probably created Iceland, which was the demise of the dinosaurs.
Steiger: Because it threw up a bunch of dust or something? Or what?
Luck: This is true.
Steiger: And it just covered up the oxygen?
Luck: It blocked out the sun, and it stopped a lot of growth. It created so much global dust that the huge beasts couldn't breathe, and so they fell down, they died. The smaller beasts survived. [B's comment: And the cockroaches shall inherit the earth.]
Steiger: And so this guy says we're looking for another hit, which is going to be the same kind of deal?
Luck: Not until 2002.
Steiger: Damn, that ain't much time!
Luck: (laughs) You're going to live to see it -I might not. (laughs)
Steiger: Well, you'd better!
Luck: Unless they can divert it, it's probably going to happen.
Steiger: Well, you don't know, I don't know either, if I am going to live to see it. I don't think you can know.
Luck: [How old are you?]
Steiger: I'm thirty-eight, but who knows how long you've got? That's the thing that strikes me. I mean, I think it's kind of a crapshoot kind of deal.
Luck: You know what perturbs me about this "global warming" bullshit? You know what happens if you have a global warming? The oceans are going to start to steam up -they're going to warm, right? It causes more rain. What cooled this sonofabitch to start with? Rain! These people are so far off the goddam. . . . I told you what it took to become a member of this Association of Concerned Scientists.
Steiger: Twenty bucks.
Luck: (derisively) Twenty bucks! And this Association of Concerned Scientists, most of those people [who sent in their] twenty bucks are dumber than a goddam post.
Steiger: That's what it takes to be a member of Grand Canyon River Guides! (laughter) Twenty bucks!
Luck: Let me go back here and get a book. (tape turned off and on)
Steiger: Were you always interested in science, or was that something that started after you started looking into this geology? I mean, what took you out there into the stars? Was it thinking about the Canyon and all that stuff? Or were you just interested in that before?
Luck: The main thing that got me interested in it was the ionosphere.
Steiger: I don't even know what that is, the ionosphere.
Luck: Okay, a teacher I had in high school, back in the late forties. . . .
Steiger: In Vernal?
Luck: Yeah. We were studying in class about radio. And he started talking about the reflectivity of the ionosphere on radio beams -how at certain times of the day you can reflect a radio beam off the ionosphere to a certain spot on the earth. You look perplexed!
Steiger: It's because I am! Is the ionosphere like space? Is that up above. . . .
Luck: It's quite a ways out.
Steiger: Well there's the atmosphere and then the stratosphere and then the ionosphere? Is that how. . . . See, I don't have that much training, I really don't. I don't have squat for an education.
Luck: I don't either. I'm dumber than a post.
Steiger: Yeah, right!
Luck: You're familiar with what they call "skip" on a C.B., citizens' band radio?
Steiger: Uh-huh.
Luck: Where you can sit here in Kanab, Utah, and talk to somebody in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Right?
Steiger: Yeah. Well, I mean, vaguely.
Luck: The only way that's feasibly possible is a straight-line deal, right?
Steiger: To talk on a C.B.?
Luck: Yeah. Okay, this is a straight-line communication. You've got the curvature of the earth that's going to stop you from doing that. You can't do it. So it has to have a reflective object, much like a satellite, which we're using now, which perpetuated this whole satellite thing.
Steiger: People accidentally were going, "Hey, we're getting this reception way over here."
Luck: Yeah. And it goes up and hits the ionosphere and reflects back down to planet Earth. God knows where, depending on the ionosphere. And that's how you can set here with a C.B. and talk to somebody in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Steiger: And this is something that they were figuring out in the forties, and mentioned it to you guys in Vernal?
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: I don't know how I missed it in the sixties in Prescott, Arizona, but I did. Or I just didn't remember it.
Luck: Well maybe you didn't have the type of teachers we had! No offense meant.
Steiger: Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention.
Luck: Hey, I've got a couple of hands down at the shop that are that way. (chuckles) You know what I induce attention with? Firecrackers! When I catch them asleep on their feet.
Steiger: Do you carry some around in your pocket?
Luck: Indubitably. You sound like you were unaware of this deal on the radio.
Steiger: Yeah, I was, I have very little scientific background. I mean, I have a vague notion of the Big Bang and I know the Earth is maybe 4½ billion years old, and just kind of the rudiments of geology. But I don't know all that much about any of that stuff. And as far as where this whole thing came from, I have only the vaguest, half-formed notions about it.
Luck: I don't put myself up to be a smart old sonofabitch, either. Alright? But I have tried to listen to those who think they know. And so far, people like Gene Shoemaker and Silver and Sharp have been a real inspiration to me.
Steiger: (looking at book) Boy, some of these are beautiful pictures. This is Hillers taking these?
Luck: Hillers and Beamon. Bob Hillers -you gotta kind of take your hat off to that guy. Little bit of a cowboy who learned how to shoot a goddam camera.
Steiger: I guess!
Luck: And had the guts to stay in there.
Steiger: It looks like he had an appreciation of life. Some of this, there seem to be a bunch of these taken at a time of day that they were pretty darned interesting.
Luck: Somewhere, Shoemaker's got pictures of my boat setting in the exact photo points that _________ was. He never did send me photo copies.
Steiger: It seems like you've taken so many interesting people down there. The people in general, did you see them evolve? Well, I guess you did. You said they were adventurers at first.
Luck: Yeah.
Steiger: And were they quite that way in the end?
Luck: Oh no -vacationers. Wanted to "do what the Joneses did," type deal.
Steiger: But it sounds like there's a bunch of interesting. . . . I mean, I guess this Shoemaker and. . . . In your mind, are there people that really, really stick out as being the most important ones you ever took down -just to you, for whatever reason?
Luck: Well, I've had a couple of three incidents. Back in the early seventies, the Anheuser Busch Corporation thought that it might be a morale builder for their sales personnel. And so they sent down some [people?] with me. And I carried them through. I met the criteria. And so later on, August Busch and company -whatever -came down, made the trip. But I had to prove that we had aerial surveillance twice a day, that would prove that they were alright and everything was okay. Well, what they didn't know, the guy that was running the aerial surveillance was my damned brother-in-law.
Steiger: And he'd just fly over?
Luck: God no! He'd come down to where you could touch the BFGs -and hiding all the [identification] numbers. Back then there were not so many government toads in the Canyon. And he always called me "Big Brother." He'd come in about eight o'clock in the morning -he knew I'd be on the water, knew about where I'd be at, because he's run "the creek" himself. He'd buzz down, show nothing but the back of the airplane. He'd say, "Everything alright, Big Brother?" "Yeah, you got it, Little Brother." (laughs) A lot of you people didn't know that kind of shit went on, right?
Steiger: Well, not exactly that. I mean, I've had a couple of wild plane rides down in there too, a couple of times, and didn't think anything of it.
Luck: What do you mean, "wild plane rides"?
Steiger: Well, I had this friend that had a Citabria. It was a high school buddy and when I started working for Fred, I was still in high school, and I ended up. . . . I quit school and bought a boat and went on this training trip and took this high school buddy of mine with me. To pay me back, he took me on a plane ride one day. He had this aerobatic airplane.
Luck: I know what a Citabria is.
Steiger: Yeah, well, he had one of them, that his old man had helped him buy. And just when we were just out of school. . . .
Luck: Who are you talking about?
Steiger: Tom Lefebvre. His old man was an airline pilot, and he flew for Leesburg a little bit, and now he's a crop duster. But he was just a born pilot, and so he took me for a ride through the Canyon, because I had taken him for one, and it scared me to death, I gotta tell ya'! I mean, just right down there, right down on the deck for a bunch of it.
Luck: (chuckles) You probably wouldn't want to ride with me, would you? (laughs)
Steiger: I think I would ride with you.
Luck: Why?
Steiger: Well, just because I'd. . . .
Luck: Because I'm afraid of dying.
Steiger: Well, I would trust you, I would -I do.
Luck: You didn't him?
Steiger: No, I did, because I got in there and went with him. Well, actually, no, I did trust him and I went with him, and he scared me to death, but here I am! I'd go with him again. I still trust him. But there's guys I've ridden with in a plane that I don't trust, and guys that I wouldn't go with again. (tape turned off and on)
Luck: Bill and Bucky Boren [phonetic spelling] walked into the warehouse down there at Fredonia. They're looking for employment. And I told you earlier that I broke four ribs in Deubendorff. I'm walking around limping and taped; Bryce Mackey is walking around on a wooden leg: And they said, "Jesus Christ, is this someplace we want to try to work?!" That type thing. But they hired on and became some of the best Grand Canyon boatmen that ever walked. He [Buck Boren] was a damned good one. I worked with Scott up on the Yampa and the Grand. He proved to be a good one there. The Boren boys were good people.
Steiger: I never knew Buck that good, but I did several trips with Bill.
Luck: You missed a real point by not running with Buck. Buck was damned sure a good one, and so was Scott.
Steiger: Scott Dunn?
Luck: No, Scott Boren.
Steiger: He was their big brother?
Luck: No, little brother.
[END OF INTERVIEW]